Away from the traffic noise on the main road that crosses the Tamar at New Bridge (built in 1520), narrow ways wend through Dimson, on the edge of Hingston Down, dropping towards the river. Cottages, terraced houses and residents’ cars crowd lanes among little enclosures, once intensively cultivated by miners, quarrymen and brick-workers; a lower rough track, covered in fallen leaves, gives views of the expansive coniferous and oak woodland surrounding the remains of the Devon Great Consols mine opposite. By the river, horses graze paddocks in the Hawksmoor meander, site of the local cricket ground as well as a derelict mine now used by a furniture restorer.
Beside a path edged in mossy blocks of stone, yellow leaves cling to hazel scrub among the greenery of bramble and ivy. Before the arrival of the East Cornwall mineral railway, linking local mines and quarries with the tidal reach at Calstock, this muddy track was a tramway for the transport of copper ore towards wharves at Gunnislake – then the head of navigation.
Half a mile upriver from the bridge, the lower engine house of the Clitters mine was built in 1882 over an older waterwheel pit that pumped river water to ore-dressing floors and powered an air fan in the adit that extended for three-quarters of a mile into the hill. The new engine, from the Tavy Iron Works in Tavistock, pumped water even further uphill, to the mine’s mill and engine boilers. In the 19th century this steep north-facing land would have been almost denuded of vegetation, dominated by smoking chimneys, dust and expanding burrows or heaps of mine waste. Today, the consolidated ruins of buildings and stacks are barely visible among regenerated trees and trunks growing from older stumps.
Water rushes through this gorge-like section of the valley, where drifts of leaves stranded on tops of boulders indicate yesterday’s higher level. Tumbled walls and quarry faces are clothed in vivid mosses; woodrush, spiky Hard fern, tall Buckler and Male ferns grow through the orange and yellow leaf litter of beech, chestnut and oak, and, on red-stained spoil tips, conifers and birch overgrow ling and gorse.
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