15 Tinners and Streamers

William Harper 1808-1854

I had struggled a little with the handwriting on the digitised image of the 1841 Census when I first found 3xgreat grandparents, William and Mary Ann Harper that year. The indexing was clear, we were in Altarnun District 2, but the hamlets across the district were a world unknown to me at that stage and I had little confidence deciphering one Tre- from another.

I turned of course to my beloved map collection, the customised OS prints which cover my study wall, the Ordnance Survey Explorer 109, folded and unfolded in the field or across my dining table, and the paradise of the National Library of Scotland’s map archive. Scores of maps from across the decades and centuries at scales big and small, digitised and out there for all of us to wander through at our leisure.

One day I will write more about my love of maps, the joy of hours at the cartography tables at university and a career in the early days of digitised spatial data. But for today, all you need to know is that my hungry mind is always happy wandering through space and time, whether I’m on foot, paper or through my screen.

1841 residence of William and Mary Ann Harper

The 1841 handwriting matched Trevague, one of a string of hamlets south of Altarnun, scattered along the infant waters of the River Lynher as it emerges from Bodmin Moor. These waters are amongst the western-most edges of the Tamar catchment, and will roll for 20 miles south-east, defiantly independent as far as the Hamoaze, the estuarine Tamar, where they flow together through Plymouth Sound.

Trevague, Trenilk and Tregenna had caught my imagination, and walking their paths and lanes was the magnet for my Rising Sun trip.

12 The Rising Sun

A second census riddle was great-great-great-grandad William’s occupation.

Tin Streamer

Whilst it conjured up movie pictures in my head of sieving through river gravel in the American Gold Rush it was outside my knowledge of Cornish tin extraction, which I associated more with towering engine house relics.

Just as with my personal mineral exploration on discovering The Copper Kite (whose son Joseph would marry William Harper’s daughter Emma in 1871), it was time to learn more about tin.

03 The Copper Kite

William and Mary Ann’s life was on the fringe of my known world, I saw them on the map in tiny hamlets on the edge of Bodmin Moor. A liminal existence sifting for minerals, moving between one hamlet to the next; Trevague in 1841, Warleggon when daughter Emma is baptised in 1844, Trenilk in 1851.

I walked in their footsteps one glorious sunny April afternoon. Tooled up with home-printed fragments of Cornwall XXII.NW, surveyed by the Ordnance Survey in 1881-1882 stuffed in my sweaty pocket and the OS App on my iPhone I stepped through the places they lived their life.

Ragged and stained from multiple pocketing, my 1880 route map

I have a labyrinth of tales from my wanderings to share in future posts.

The precarious 1800s mining gig economy, surfaced in the testimonies of labourer John Popplestone, miner William Rowe, timekeeper George Spargo and Charles Pearson – adventurer and manager at Great Tregune Consols Mine, before Launceston mayor J Doidge Esq in miner John Eastcott’s perjury case, February 1861.

An age-old story of wealth extraction brought to life through the bickerings of landed gentry Francis Rodd Esq and Edward Archer Esq. They brought their dispute over the ownership of Trevague Common to the courts in 1855 after the removal of “certain soil and gravel containing mineral from a spot of land occupied by the plaintiff”. Who owned the land above, and who the soil below? Who worked the land, and where did the wealth go?

And in my continued wonder at discovering closer connections to Cornish clichés, my own “Cousin Jack” story (albeit they were called Sampson and Henry and great-great-great-grandmother Mary Ann’s brothers-in-law rather than an actual cousin). Emmigrants in 1849 and 1858 to Bendigo, South Australia at the height of the antipodean gold rush.

I’m publishing this post the weekend of the Salt Path film release. You can read about my wanderings on another West Country trail, the Tamara Coast to Coast Way, here.