Great British Railway Journeys

by Charlie Bunce

  Rob’s tips for creating your own Transition Town start with finding a few reliable like-minded people to form a steering group. Before your official launch, arrange a few thought-provoking events, so people understand what the issues and aims are. If you can create a groundswell of people fired up on the key issues, you’re much more likely to be successful as you move forward. The extraordinary thing is that what started in a small way in Totnes is now being used by thousands of towns, cities and villages around the world.

  From Totnes the line skirts the southern edge of Dartmoor and then, after crossing the Tamar at Saltash on Brunel’s enormous Royal Albert Bridge (his last great achievement, completed in 1859, the year he died), you are in Cornwall. We carried on west through St Germans, and shortly before St Austell we stopped at a small town called Par, which Bradshaw described as ‘a mining town in west Cornwall near the sea with several important mines round it in the granite producing copper, nickel, with clay, and china stone for the Staffordshire potteries’. In fact, Par was an important hub for the huge industry fed by the biggest china clay deposits in the world. For almost 100 years clay used in the Potteries for making porcelain was shipped northwards by sea and canal. In the 1840s the railways took over, and soon it was being ferried on a network of lines that criss-crossed the county.

  Most of those lines are long gone now, but one that does still run is used by the clay train that carries 1,140 tons of clay each day to the port of Fowey. Though it rarely takes passengers, we were lucky enough to hitch a ride along a single-track line through stunning Cornish countryside towards to the sea.

  Because it’s a single track, the trains have a very simple safety system that Bradshaw would have recognised. For the train to go down the track, it has to collect from the signal box a token in the form of a staff, like a heavy relay baton – and there’s only one token in circulation for the line, so once you have it you know there’s nothing about to come the other way.

  The first Cornish clay mines opened in 1746, and by the middle of the eighteenth century 60,000 tons were being extracted each year. Although there are only three mines in operation now, thanks to modern techniques those remaining mines are thriving, extracting 1.5 million tons a year. Today 85 per cent of the total tonnage goes abroad, where it’s used for everything from paper whitening to the manufacture of paint, plastics and pharmaceuticals.

  Many of the scars left by the closed mines have been disguised with landscaping, but one pit has been radically recycled and is now home to the Eden Project. Its two bio-domes, recreating the rainforest and the Mediterranean, are the largest conservatories in the world. The founders didn’t want the project to overwhelm the landscape, so they located them discreetly in the disused pit. Supported by a good train service, it’s become one of the country’s greenest tourist attractions.

  Our next stop was only a few miles further down the line at St Austell, the closest we could get by train to the fishing port of Mevagissey on Cornwall’s south coast. Whilst the Mevagissey that Bradshaw visited was on the Holiday Line, it was anything but a popular destination at that time, being ‘so filthy that it is a very hot-bed of disease, when the cholera is abroad’.

  Mevagissey would certainly have been messy, because it was the centre of the pilchard industry, which in the nineteenth century provided jobs for thousands of locals. It wasn’t a glamorous profession. Men called huers perched overlooking the sea to spy where the seabirds were fishing for pilchards. These observers, the origin of the phrase ‘hue and cry’, then alerted local fishermen, who took off in their boats to bring home as many fish from the vast shoals as they could muster. Often the men would be gone throughout the night, not returning until noon the following day, by which time a crowd would have gathered to meet them. Mevagissey women salted and stored the catch in caskets at processing plants called pilchard palaces. At its peak in 1871, the industry caught, cured and transported 16,000 tons of pilchards. Although the size of the catch diminished, possibly due to over-fishing, there remained sufficient to furnish the market.

  The Royal Albert Viaduct linking Devon and Cornwall was completed by Brunel in the year of his death and crosses the river Tamar.

  Getty Images

  Michael Portillo gets the feel for a fisherman’s life.

  © Jon Hall

  In Britain pilchards were mostly sold in tins and were traditionally a cheap, popular food for the masses. However, after the Second World War tinned fish was strongly associated with wartime rationing. As a result, by the 1950s pilchards had become one of the least popular foods in Britain.

  In 1997 the industry was in crisis, with fishermen earning as little as 1.5p a kilo. However, the humble Cornish pilchard has since enjoyed something of a renaissance after a local factory owner had a rebranding brainwave. He started marketing his common pilchards as ‘Cornish sardines’ and, thanks to this new Mediterranean image, sales soared. Fishermen were soon earning around a £1 a kilo, making the enterprise economical once more. There are now 12 boats working out of Mevagissey and neighbouring Newlyn that have pilchards in their sights.

  Fortunately, in the interim the narrow alleys and cliff-clinging houses that border the picture-postcard harbour transformed Mevagissey from a down-at-heel fishing village to a hub for tourists. With thousands of visitors passing through its streets and lanes each year, its place on the Holiday Line now seems better deserved.

  As a guide Bradshaw’s book has its shortcomings. Some places would be easy to bypass thanks to his terse entries. Others are a lot more alluring, especially when his entries hint at something that’s mysterious and tantalising. That was certainly the case at Perran Sands, where the very simple description refers to ‘the remains of an old church of St Piran, an ancient British edifice which had been covered by the shifting sands for centuries’. The more we delved, the more fascinating the story became.

  Perran Sands, on the other side of the peninsula from Megavissey, is an amazing landscape, boasting some of the largest sand-dunes in Britain. As it happens, the sands encase not one but two significant Christian sites. St Piran’s Oratory was allegedly built by the saint himself after he landed on Cornish shores. It was here that he apparently healed the sick and even gave life to the dead. And here too he saw molten metal ooze from the Cornish slate that he used as a hearth. He shared this information with local people, and a busy mining industry was founded. The Cornish flag, a white cross on a black background, is said to be inspired by the hearth incident.

  FOR A TIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, CORNWALL’S TIN AND COPPER INDUSTRIES DOMINATED THE WORLD

  In the end the wind-blown sands got the better of the Oratory. It was given up to nature and a new church was built, probably in the tenth century. On the principle that sand would not cross water, a site was chosen with a stream forming a boundary between it and the beach.

  This new church became a major draw for pilgrims on their way to Santiago di Compostela in northern Spain, where the bones of the apostle St James are said to be buried. The attraction of the Cornish church was presumably various relics, including the head of St Piran kept in a silver casket. (Apparently it was excavated at the start of the twentieth century, but disappeared almost immediately, into the hands of an unidentified thief.)

  Unfortunately, the activities of tin miners underground disrupted the stream and allowed sand to encroach on the church. By the nineteenth century plans to build a third place of worship were well underway. Some but not all the stone from the existing church was taken for the new construction.

  Clearly St Piran was an inspiration. But, although he is the patron saint of tin-miners and is generally thought of as one of three national saints closely associated with Cornwall, no one knows for certain who he was. According to legend he came from Ireland, where heathens tied him to a mill-stone before rolling him over a cliff and into a stormy sea. The sea immediately became calm and St Piran floated away, landing on the Cornish coast. He lived in Cornwall, performing miracles, until the
age of 206.

  The shifting dunes have at times parted to reveal both buildings. However, for their own protection, they have been covered again, the sands only serving to enhance the romance of the site.

  The railways brought visitors to Cornwall, but they were also incredibly important to local industry. As with the china clay mines, a railway system had developed around the tin and copper mines, with mile after mile of tiny branch lines feeding individual pits. Our next stop, at the town of Redruth, was at its heart

  Tin and copper had been extracted here for centuries, but the development of the steam engine put Cornwall on the mining map. Steam-powered pumps enabled miners to dig deeper and faster, producing more ore. The same technology developed the steam locomotive, which meant the metals could be quickly and easily transported around the country. For a time in the nineteenth century, Cornwall’s tin and copper industries dominated the world. At the end of the nineteenth and through the twentieth century, however, those mines closed one by one, unable to live with competition from tin mines in Australia and Asia and the copper mines of Chile and America.

  The South Crofty mine, near the village of Pool between Redruth and Camborne, had been active for some 400 years. In its heyday it was one of Cornwall’s most productive mines, but in 1998, when the value of tin fell to uneconomic levels, Cornwall’s last tin mine closed its gates, with little hope for a rebirth in the future.

  But it now seems, against all expectations, that there could be a future for South Crofty after all. John Webster, Chief Operations Officer of Western United Mines, is sure that a combination of new technologies and a rise in the price of tin means that we may not have seen the last of Cornish metal mining. Just as the steam technology observed by Bradshaw drove the mining industry forward for the Victorians, new technology is doing the same today. John’s team are using modern methods of X-ray analysis to test samples of rock for up to 60 different minerals. It’s a hand-held device that can be used in mine shafts as the cores of rock are removed, and it has already revealed South Crofty to be sufficiently rich in metals, including silver, zinc, tin and copper, to make its shafts profitable again. John hopes that within five years they will be extracting 750,000 tonnes of ore annually and, if things go well, the total will ultimately be double that. In South Crofty’s heyday annual production was only 10,000 tonnes.

  Conditions were notoriously grim for tin miners in Cornwall.

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  Relics from the mining era cling to the Cornish landscape.

  Photolibrary

  Visiting the mine and seeing the shafts drilled out by hand leaves you in no doubt about how dangerous working there in Bradshaw’s day must have been. There were no fans and no ventilation. The average lifespan of a miner was under 40 years, with children working there from as young as eight. While vast fortunes were made for some entrepreneurial Victorians, the flipside of this was that the miners and their families remained desperately poor.

  THE AVERAGE LIFESPAN OF A MINER WAS UNDER 40 YEARS, WITH CHILDREN WORKING THERE FROM AS YOUNG AS EIGHT

  Our journey continued by stunning seascapes and some of Britain’s most popular holiday resorts. It was very clear from reading Bradshaw that these had become destinations only since and as a result of the arrival of the railways. St Ives, for example, is synonymous today with its artists’ community and holidays, but when the railway came in 1877 it was to a town dependent on fishing.

  That industry was so important that an enormous pier and harbour had been built in the eighteenth century to handle the 400 or so fishing boats working out of the port. Whilst St Ives still boasts a working harbour, it’s mainly pleasure boats that now head out to sea. Its streets and lanes are packed with tourists who have come here to enjoy the beautiful beaches and turquoise seas. The Great Western Railway was enormously instrumental in that change, even buying Treganna Castle, then the home of the Stephens family, high on the hill overlooking St Ives, and turning it into a luxury hotel to promote tourism and rail travel.

  For the last leg of our journey, we headed to Penzance – as far west as it is possible to travel by train – completing a journey from Swindon that would have taken two days by horse and coach. The railway cut that time down to about six hours, and changed the people and the towns and villages along the route for ever. Even the tiny remote village of Penzance, at the very end of the Holiday Line, was soon turning its back on its traditional vegetable-growing businesses as it attracted holidaymakers in droves. Today 5 million tourists spend £1.5 billion in Cornwall to ensure its economic survival, in a success story that began 170 years ago with the birth of the modern railway.

  By 1930 the vegetable growing business in Penzance was second string to the tourism industry, which began with the arrival of the train.

  SSPL/Getty Images

  JOURNEY 3

  BRINGING BEER DOWN SOUTH

  From Buxton to London

  These days, most of our freight is transported around the country by road, but in the nineteenth century it was the new railways that hauled goods most cheaply and swiftly, revolutionising industry in the process. Our next journey started in the open spaces of Derbyshire’s Peak District on one of the earliest railway routes in England, built to transport freight from north to south. This gave towns at the heart of the Industrial Revolution an artery through which to whisk their goods into the nation’s capital. It created booms in the towns through which it passed, and we wanted to retrace that route to see the impact the railways had on these towns and the people living and working in them.

  Our first stop was Buxton. Just like Bath, it was founded by the Romans as a spa settlement and in the eighteenth century was an upmarket resort, to which the rich travelled from all over Britain to sample the waters. Even Buxton’s architecture mimics its southern sister, with a crescent that Bradshaw describes as ‘the principal building of Buxton … erected by the late Duke of Devonshire and has three storeys and extends for 257 feet’. Built in the 1780s, The Crescent in Buxton was a direct copy of Bath’s Royal Crescent, designed by architect John Wood the Younger.

  For the next 40 years the Duke of Devonshire led the building of new attractions, including the Opera House, the Pavilion Gardens and the Palace Hotel, all funded by the citizens of Buxton themselves. His vision paid off, never more so than after the arrival of the train in 1863, bringing thousands of paying customers. Buxton flourished as a resort, and the efforts of the incumbent Duke are still reaping rewards. Even though spas have fallen from grace, more than 100 years later these Victorian attractions are still drawing the crowds all year round.

  One of Buxton’s most magnificent buildings is the Duke of Devonshire’s extraordinary stable block which today houses a university campus. According to Bradshaw, it was built at a cost of £120,000, which equates to about £5 million in today’s money.

  The building, unlike any other stables in the world, is dramatically capped by a huge dome. With a span of 145 feet this dome is larger than those of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Pantheon and St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Today, thanks to modern technology, builders can mimic a dome like this or even much larger with little effort, but for its time it was simply breathtaking. It weighs a hefty 560 tonnes and cuts a dramatic shape in the Buxton skyline. The dome was finally completed in 1881, over 100 years after the rest of the building, and strangely it probably owes its survival to a distant train crash.

  An eighteenth century octagonal stable block roof was replaced by the world’s largest freestanding dome after the building was converted to a hospital in the nineteenth century.

  Designers took heed of the 1879 Tay Bridge tragedy, which occurred because of a flaw with the rivets, and modified blueprints of the dome.

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  On Sunday, 28 December 1879, the Tay Bridge between Dundee and Wormit was being lashed by a violent storm. The bridge, designed by Sir Thomas Boucher, had opened only the previous summer and was the longest in the world. It also had unusually steep gr
adients.

  No one knows just what happened that night, only that the bridge collapsed as a train crossed at its highest point. The alarm was raised by a signalman, who had waited in vain on the far side of the bridge for the passing of the train. When it failed to appear he went out to investigate, having to crawl on all fours at times to keep his balance in the high winds, and discovered the awful truth. Although there was a search of the Tay that night by steamers, not one of the 72 passengers or three crew was found alive. Indeed, many of the dead were lost to the river waters for ever. Among the victims was Boucher’s son-in-law.

  When engineers examined the wreckage, they discovered that it was insufficiently braced for high winter winds like those on the night of the disaster. Looking more closely, investigators realised that essential rivets had not been lined up properly with the receiving holes, with the result that rivets sheared off in the high winds and the bridge collapsed.

  This shock revelation led to work on similar constructions being halted immediately. These included the Forth Bridge, also designed by Boucher, and the dome on the Duke’s stables, designed by architect Robert Rippon Duke. Although the dome was designed to very tight tolerances, prior to the accident a degree of inaccuracy was regarded as acceptable. Where the rivets and holes didn’t align, the practice of the time was to force them, which the Victorians called ‘drifting’ them in. Sometimes the rivets were even heated red hot in order to get them to fit, causing them to lose their shape and strength. Rippon Duke was so worried that he had all the dome’s rivets removed and the holes redrilled to align properly, with the result that it stands as strong and proud today as it did when it was finished 130-odd years ago. It was a lesson quickly learnt and one that changed the way the Victorians built, helping them achieve many more incredible feats of engineering that we would pass as our journeys continued.