The Minions

 Dear Gentle Readers

Today we left our accommodation at the Creamery and headed for Minions, a town in Cornwall. However the owner of the Creamery told us about a monument just out of town that we should visit and here is Victoria inspecting the Doniert Stones.

Doniert was the last king of Cornwall about 900 years ago and these stones commemorate him. The smaller stone has a Latin inscription carved into it.

This is the inscription. It says "Doniert rogavit pro anima" which translates to "Doniert has begged prayers for his soul".

The stones were located at an important crossroad of tracks that divided the downland. Other records from two centuries later said that he drowned.

Anyway, what's so special about the town of Minions. Well for one, it is the highest town in Cornwall and it was the site of a thriving copper mining industry. This was a machine house for some of the mines. When the mines were exhausted, many people left the area and emigrated to other countries, including Australia.

There are numerous mineshafts littering the landscape. This one was almost overgrown. Another one we saw had not one but two barbed wire fences around it, no doubt to keep the curious out and from killing themselves falling into it.

But Minions has other things to inspect, like this Bronze Age Barrow, the Rillaton Barrow, a burial chamber for someone important and when it was excavated in 1837, a gold cup, a bronze dagger and other items were discovered in it. It is now a Scheduled Monument and has been resealed for its preservation.

Other ancient relics are here too, like this stone circle. These are called the Hurlers and legend has it they are men turned to stone for playing a Cornish game of hurling on Sunday. It's about 4000 years old and is one of three stone circles here.

 

We had been told to go and see the Cheesewring, so we did, driving down a very rugged road to get these pictures. The stacks of stones look like cheeses stacked on top of each other and they are completely natural.

This is a closeup (thank you 600mm telephoto lens) and you can see people standing next to it. These are hikers and they are numerous around Cornwall, walking long distances to get to these monuments. We also saw many cyclists, bikes loaded up with multiple panniers carrying all their supplies, and pedalling up some very steep hills.

Another thing we had been told to see was this, the Gold Digging Quarry, now a beautiful natural swimming pool. This enormous quarry was carved out of solid granite to extract the gold ore. Another very rough road led to this, but we were blocked by a large tractor tyre in the middle of the road. The road was narrow and bordered on both sides by ditches, so I had to reverse back along it for about half a mile, the longest drive in reverse I have ever done.

Where is all the granite they quarried? Right here in one of several very large granite dumps.

This piece of granite demonstrates how it was split from the hill. Holes are drilled (by hand, this is the 19th century) and a feather ( a brass construction that looks like two feathers joined at the bottom) is inserted into the holes. A metal pole is hammered into each feather, causing the granite to crack, resulting in this pattern you can see here.

Oh, yes, while were standing next to the machine house, we heard hoofbeats and this herd of horses galloped past us then turned around and came right up to us. Apparently they are wild but not completely so as someone looks after them. They wouldn't let us approach them.

Later on, we drove across this bridge, the Bideford Bridge, the longest bridge in Cornwall.

Stay tuned for more sight-seeing tomorrow.