Mahonia flowers, fir and variegated holly garland the entrance to All Saints church – this year’s venue for Calstock parish’s Christmas tree festival. Inside the Victorian building with its tiled floor and vaulted ceiling, trees have been decorated by local schools, voluntary and community groups.
Built during the mining boom the church was also used as a school on weekdays, with a roll of 164 pupils in 1876. In 1879 a new school, one that would appeal to the Nonconformists too, was built by Mr Hunn of Metherell for £904 on half an acre of land, bought by the Education Board for £40 from the lord of the manor (Mr Williams of Caerhayes Castle).
Then, local mines still produced tin and arsenic ores, and the Coombe arsenic refinery was coming into peak capacity. Mispickel (arsenical pyrites) was brought here for crushing, grinding and burning to produce tons of the white-powdered poison that had to be securely packed and carted to Calstock’s quays for eventual shipment to the US, Egypt, Sudan and India, where it was used to kill boll weevils in the cotton fields.
Today, few of the residents of the renovated terraces, newer bungalows and houses are tempted out into the dullness of this foggy afternoon. In the little field adjoining the church, newly planted apple trees and a row of beehives are overlooked by the misty outline of the arsenic flue chimney – now a consolidated and harmless relic of previous industrialisation.
Nearby, Rising Sun Lane is edged in drifts of soggy orange leaves and outgrown hedgerows of beech with mossy trunks alongside the Prince of Wales mine – now a scheduled monument. Fenced off shafts, tailings (dumps of waste sand) and ruined engine houses that used to work pumps, winding gear and stamps (crushers) are engulfed in birch trees and flowering gorse.
Water droplets festoon twigs and prickles and add tiny glints of potential brilliance to the gloom. Later, out in the open and away from overhanging trees, a delicately luminous disc of light appears low in the south-west and marks the approach of the winter solstice.
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