Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 1, Episode 14 - Bugle to Mevagissey - full transcript
In 1840 one man transformed
travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw
and his railway guides
inspired the Victorians
to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop,
he told them where to travel
what to see and where to stay.
Now 170 years later
I'm making four long journeys across
the length and breadth of the country
to see what remains of Bradshaw's Britain.
Using my ancient Bradshaw's Guide,
my rail journey has at last
brought me to Cornwall.
The arrival of the railways
in the 19th century
knitted together
Britain's towns and cities.
But even the fastest trains
left Cornwall feeling remote.
I'm hereto look at two industries
that draw on the county's
natural resources.
They're both mentioned in Bradshaw's,
they've survived into modern times,
and one is even staging a revival.
Today I'll be visiting the largest
china clay mines in the world.
MICHAEL: What an extraordinary scene,
like a vast moonscape.
I 7! be seeing
how the Victorian spirit of adventure
shaped British gardens.
We're celebrating the Victorian tradition
of how things were gardened,
the Victorian attitudes to life,
and also the people
who worked in these gardens.
That's what we regard as lost.
And I'll be discovering
what's happened to the humble pilchard.
There is a big demand for pilchards
which has been renamed the "sardine“.
Ah. The sardine and the pilchard
are one and the same, are they?
They are exactly the same.
All this week I've been travelling
from Swindon along the Holiday Line.
After heading south
through Somerset and Devon
I'm now moving into Cornwall.
Here the Great Western Railway
made the whole peninsular
accessible to tourists,
an the way to Penzance.
Today I'll continue west along the coast
from Totnes to Par and St Austell
and push on to Mevagissey.
Bradshaw's commends Cornwall
not for its beauty
but its minerals and says,
“The most important objects in the history
of this county are its numerous mines
which for centuries have furnished
employment to thousands of inhabitants. "
You don't see that Cornwall
from a railway carriage today.
It's more famous for second-homers,
and tourists admiring
its stupendous landscapes,
as I am.
Today I'm in St Germans
and, as usual,
my day begins in a railway carriage.
But this one
isn't actually going anywhere.
Welcome to the travelling post office
where I spent the night.
Now, as you see,
it's fully equipped with a kitchen.
Everything
you could possibly want, I think.
That's where I had my breakfast.
Plenty of room to sit.
The Post Office began sending
the mail by train in the 18305
and soon created special rolling stock
so that letters
could be sorted on the move.
By the early 20th century,
there were around 77 such carriages.
And the service ran right up to 2004.
The kids are going to love this.
Two bunk beds in a sweet little bedroom.
And this leads through to the adults'
bedroom where I spent the night.
Now, is any of you old enough
to remember this?
The leather-strap window.
You pull on the leather strap.
I've been practising that all morning.
You can tell by the change in the design.
And now the pièce de résistance.
Ah-ha.
My own private entrance.
This old travelling post office
is owned by Lizzie and David Stroud,
who also converted the station next door.
I'm Michael. I was your guest last night.
- Pleased to meet you.
- How do you do?
So I take it that this railway station
is actually your home. Is that right?
Yes, that's correct.
We've lived here since 1992.
No, we've got thick double glazing
so it doesn't bother us at all, actually.
No, we've got thick double glazing
so it doesn't bother us at all, actually.
The noise is shielded by the platform.
You only get the sound
of a train as it passes
while in the village you get the sound
as it's coming and going away as well.
So it's actually relatively quiet
living in the station.
I stayed in the travelling post office,
which was very, very nice.
Tell me what's left of it
as a travelling post office.
Because I imagined lots of pigeon holes
where you put the letters.
DAVID: Unfortunately,
when we bought the travelling post office,
that had been stripped out
because it had been lived in as a house.
That's how these old carriages survive.
They get lived in.
MICHAEL: Of course, what you've got
to get used to in a carriage
is that you've got plenty of space
but it's very, very long.
If you're having breakfast
and you've forgotten something,
you've got to prepare
for a very long walk.
It's quite a long track in that one.
It's 48ft long.
The people who come and stay with you,
are they railway nutters?
I mean, let's be frank about this.
There's just such a mix, isn't there?
We get some hardened train spotters
but we also get a lot of families as well.
- Increasingly families, actually.
- Yes.
I know some people
who will be green with envy
that I stayed
in the travelling post office.
I hardly dare tell them
that I've come here.
- Bye-bye.
- Bye.
Today is Sunday
and in Bradshaw's time,
no trains ran between 10am and 4pm
during what was called
the church interval.
Sabbath observance is not what it was
but at small rural stations
like St Germans
Sunday trains are still (are.
I usually use my railway journeys
to catch up on reading Bradshaw's
but this countryside
is just so distracting.
The combination
of forests and green fields
with cows and sheep,
it's just breathtaking.
My next stop is Par,
a small town but nonetheless a hub
for the huge china clay industry.
So this is Par,
and Bradshaw's Guide says,
“A large mining town
in West Cornwall near the sea
with several important mines round it
in the granite,
producing copper and nickel,
with clay and china stone
for the Staffordshire potteries.“
It's difficult to grasp that
the china clay deposits in Cornwall are,
wait for it,
the biggest in the world!
The white porcelain clay
found here in 1746
was of the finest quality
and was in huge demand
in the Staffordshire potteries.
It was originally shipped
northwards by sea
but the railways took over in the 18403
making the process much quicker.
Clay miner Ivor Bowditch works
at one of the oldest pits
which remains highly productive.
- Welcome to clay country.
- Thank you.
What an extraordinary scene,
like a vast moonscape.
Yes, this is the largest china clay pit
probably in the world
covering some 500 acres
and has been operating
for almost 180 years.
I've been following
this 19th century guidebook.
This mine would have existed
when that was written in the 1860s?
Indeed it would.
It opened up in 1830.
And china clay itself had been operated
in Cornwall since 1746.
In Britain we're rather used
to industries being in decline.
How would the output from Cornwall
of china clay compare now
with in Bradshaw's day?
Well, production probably would have been
around the 60,000 tonnes per annum mark.
Today, together with two small
clay-producing companies,
we are seeing
1.5 million tonnes per annum.
That is an absolutely vast increase
from the 19th century.
What has been the new demand in that time?
The main driving factor
has been the use of china clay
in the manufacturing of paper and board.
In fact in the middle 19th century
paper makers found that by adding clay,
they could produce smoother, whiter paper.
And still 50% of our output
goes into paper,
30% into a whole range
of ceramic products,
and the remaining 20%
into markets such as paints,
rubbers, plastics,
sealants and adhesives, pharmaceuticals.
Every day we're handling
something containing clay.
Is it possible to get any closer?
Well, I've got you a hard hat
and a high-vis jacket,
so let's go down and see some action.
Thank you very much.
120 million tonnes of china clay
have been extracted in the past 250 years.
In Bradshaw's day it was flushed
out of the earth with hoses.
The same technique is used today.
but the hoses are much more potent.
Well, this is the operation, Michael.
We have what we call a monitor,
a water cannon,
normally firing
up to 2,000 gallons a minute.
We normally have 12,000 gallons
a minute going through the system.
- What's it doing, then?
- Washing the clay out of the ground.
We're getting the clay
into a solution, as such,
and in its liquid form
we can start to refine it and take out
the non-clay-bearing minerals.
- Would you like to have a go?
- I'd love to.
Come on over.
OK, Michael, you have two levers here.
Very simple.
On the right, vertical movement.
The one on the left,
horizontal movement.
So let me have a go.
This one does left and right.
- Correct.
- Moving to the right.
And this one is up and down.
This water cannon is really
terrifyingly powerful, isn't it?
It's powerful enough
to knock a Land Rover over.
That's how powerful they are.
The watery clay solution
is pumped to a refinery for processing.
Then the pure clay is dried,
ready for transportation.
Well, Michael, we've seen
the power of water here at 300psi.
Let's transfer the power
to 3,500 horsepower
and see a locomotive at work.
Good by me.
The railways were vital to Cornish mining.
and soon a network of lines
criss-crossed the county.
Today many of those routes have closed.
But the massive clay train
to the port of Fowey
still runs along a single track.
And I have the chance to ride on a tine
that rarely transports passengers.
Thank you.
To ensure our safety on the single track,
we're using a system
that Bradshaw would recognise.
We collect a token from the signal box
and since there's only one for the fine,
we know that no train
is running towards us.
The train we're on now,
how many tonnes are we pulling?
1,140 normally.
38 wagons, 30 tonnes a wagon.
MICHAEL: That's fantastic.
How many lorries are we replacing?
IVOR: You'd be looking
at approaching 50 lorries to move that,
so you'd have 100 lorry movements
in both directions.
MICHAEL: How often do the trains set out?
IVOR: They're working daily,
Monday to Friday.
My 19th-century guide talks
about the china clays
being taken
up to the potteries in Staffordshire.
- Does that still happen?
- It does, but not on the same scale.
Sadly, the predominance of the potteries
in Stoke-on-Trent has diminished.
The trains now are all working
to the port of Fowey,
which is the only clay port
operational today.
And they're really at the heart
of our export drive.
85% of our output is export.
Ivor, I very rarely get
to ride in the cab.
It has been really thrilling to do it.
What I hadn't expected was
the fantastic scenery we've had.
I really enjoyed that.
Thank you.
As the clay mines have been exhausted,
they've closed.
Some have been relandscaped
whilst others have been recycled.
This one houses two of the largest
conservatories in the world,
which are part of the Eden Project.
The founders didn't want the biospheres
to dominate the landscape
so they located them in a disused pit.
And helped by a good train service,
the project has become
one of the country's
greenest tourist attractions.
Next I'm travelling just a few miles on
from Par to Mevagissey,
a famous harbour
on the south coast of Cornwall.
- Hello.
- Morning.
- How are you both.
- Very well, thank you.
- Are you visiting Cornwall?
- Yes, we are.
- Isn't it beautiful?
- Fabulous and the weather's marvellous.
Aren't we lucky?
Where are you headed for now?
We're going to St Austell
and then the Lost Gardens of Heligan.
- Ah. I shall be there myself before long.
- Will you?
- Enjoy.
- Thank you. Bye-bye.
If clay was an important natural resource
in Bradshaw's time,
then so, too, was fish.
There are people who do very difficult,
dangerous, maybe dirty jobs
on which the rest of us rely,
maybe for our food.
If you live in a city,
as I have all my life,
you probably don't think much
about that kind of work.
So I'm very pleased today to have
a chance to go out with a fisherman
to get a glimpse
of the very dangerous job that they do.
I'm getting off at St Austell,
because that's as close
as the railway goes to Mevagissey.
Bradshaw describes it as "an important
fishing town in the pilchard season".
In the 19th century, the pilchard industry
provided jobs for thousands of fishermen.
The catch was salted and packaged
in caskets by women
in processing plants
called “pilchard palaces“.
In 1871 the industry reached its peak.
16,000 tonnes of pilchards
were caught, cured,
and transported to Europe by sea
and an over Britain by train.
Andrew Lakeman's family have netted
pilchards here since the 1700s.
- Hello.
- Hello, Michael.
- Let me guess. You're Andrew.
- I am.
- And that kit is for me.
- Yes, it is.
- Welcome to Mevagissey.
- Thank you.
Pilchards are best caught at night
so we're heading out in the evening.
- OK.
- Thank you.
In Bradshaw's day
men called “hewers” would gaze out to sea
to spy where seabirds
were fishing for pilchards,
then send in the boats.
It resulted in some large catches.
Today Andrew's boat uses
more sophisticated technology,
as the skipper explains.
- Skipper, hello.
- Hi. Pleased to meet you.
- Can I interrupt you a minute?
- Yeah. No problem.
- How's the hunt going?
- It's quiet at the moment.
Little bits and pieces of pilchards
but hopefully in the next half an hour,
just as it's coming to dusk,
they'll gather together.
So this is the sonar.
What are we looking for on this screen?
I'm searching at 200m at the moment.
This is the sea floor
ahead of the boat and around the boat
and we're looking for the pilchards
in this black area.
What would they look like?
We're looking for something the size
of a 20 pence piece and blood red.
- What quantity of fish would that be?
- Probably about 5-6 tonnes.
Later on in the year
we'll have marks 200m long,
100 tonnes of fish in.
So obviously we just fish
to what our orders require.
In Britain most pilchards
were sold in tins
and were cheap to buy.
But because they were associated
with wartime rationing,
by the 19503 they became
one of our least popular foods.
Fishermen could earn
only 1.5 pence per kilo.
But in the last 15 years
the humble pilchard
has enjoyed a renaissance.
So is there the demand now for pilchards?
There is a big demand for pilchards
which has been renamed the "sardine“.
Ah. The sardine and the pilchard
are one and the same, are they?
They are exactly the same.
- Really?
- Yes, they are.
But pilchard
makes me think of rusting cans,
and sardine makes me think
of Mediterranean holidays.
Well, you're probably right.
MICHAEL: I mean, the sardine now
is a very chic product, isn't it?
ANDREW: Yes, it is.
It's a very successful species.
It's bought and sold
by all the supermarkets.
We sell large quantities
to wholesalers throughout the country.
So what's in a name? A pilchard
by any other name would smell as sweet.
It's a textbook example
of what marketing or rebranding can do.
Since 1997 pilchards
have been renamed "Cornish sardines"
and the glamorous association
with balmy evenings in southern Europe
has helped pilchard sales to take off.
MICHAEL: The sun's setting.
This is the very time.
That's right. What's it now?
Nearly seven o'clock.
We're looking probably to shoot around
half past seven, something like that.
MICHAEL: That's what I like,
a man who's confident.
I've got the fish here alongside the boat.
We'll be looking
to shoot the net any time.
OK, Matt.
The net cast around the mass of fish
is designed to cut off their escape.
And once in place,
the crew hauls in the catch.
Here they come.
I can see some fish down there.
How many?
Swam.
- You haven't bust any quotas yet.
- No, not yet.
It's a modest harvest.
But it's all pilchards.
Or should I say sardines?
Very good quality fish.
They'll be in the factory tomorrow morning
and be treated in the normal way.
Now I'll think of you out here,
tossing on the wave,
as I sit down to my fish dinner.
In Bradshaw's time,
Mevagissey depended on fishing.
These days it's tourists
that bring in the money.
Indeed, one place just outside Mevagissey
now attracts almost 250,000 people a year.
This is Heligan house and estate.
The house and its owners,
the Tremayne family,
are mentioned in Bradshaw's Guide.
But Bradshaw could not have predicted
the impact that this estate
would have on British gardens.
Today the Lost Gardens of Heligan are
one of the top attractions in Cornwall.
They're looked after by horticulturalist
Philip Macmillan Browse.
Why then is this called
the lost garden of Heligan?
Everybody thinks it was because
the gardens were derelict and overgrown,
and very much so,
and recovering them
was recovering the lost gardens,
which indeed is true,
but in fact,
the reason we called it the lost garden
so that it could be a perennial title
was simply that we were trying
to recover that great surge of activity
at the end of the Victorian era
when gardening and industry
and engineering
and everything was at its peak.
We're celebrating the Victorian tradition
of how things were gardened,
the Victorian attitudes to life,
and also the people
who worked in these gardens.
That's what we regard as lost.
R was places like Heligan
that brought exotic plants
from an over the world to our gardens.
When the owners began
collecting specimens
from adventurous plant hunters
like William Lobb.
He was a Cornishman
and he was the first ever
real commercial plant collector
employed by a nurseryman
to set out and collect
what that nurseryman wanted
for his purposes,
for his commercial gain.
His main task was to go to Chile
and collect huge quantities of seed,
or as much as he could,
of the monkey puzzle tree
which was highly sought after at that time
and they couldn't get enough of it.
He trekked across the Amazon jungle,
up over the Andes
through a snow-filled mountain pass,
down the other side into Chile,
then down the western side of the Andes
to Southern Chile where he found
huge stands of the monkey puzzle tree.
He collected vast quantities of seed.
I think 13,000 trees were actually derived
from the seed he sent back.
Lobb's monkey puzzle seeds
were propagated in England
and the young trees planted at Heligan.
That's the plant up there.
Even an idiot like me can recognise
a monkey puzzle tree.
They're wonderful silhouetted
against the sky here - huge specimens.
Just like in nature in the Andes.
In the 19th century,
the middle classes sought to imitate
the fine gardens of estates like Heligan.
The railways made it practical
for even the owners of humble
suburban gardens a“ over Britain
to order from nursery catalogues
exotic species like monkey puzzles.
Most of these trees
that you see around you
are tree rhododendron species
that are about 150 years old.
And the one just up there in the corner
that you can look at
is rhododendron niveum
which is mauve in colour.
It's very unusual
because it's the same colour
as the first ever artificial dye
which was used by Queen Victoria
in the first instance to dye her dresses
and then picked up by the higher classes
who also found it fashionable.
But because it was so common, eventually,
and mass produced,
then the hoi polloi generally had it
as their fashionable colour.
Even nurses uniforms were made out of it.
And if you belonged to the upper classes
you didn't want to be associated
with the fashions of the lower classes
so you went round your garden
and you eradicated all these plants.
So mauve became unfashionable
which is probably
why you're wearing that colour shin.
- Are you calling me naff'?
- I didn't say that.
Today Heligan preserves species
from around the world
and also sustains an approach to gardening
that's little changed
since Bradshaw's time.
- Hello.
- Hi, there.
Sorry to scare you.
I'm Michael. How are you doing?
OK, yeah. I was just going
to tell you off, actually.
Well, here we are.
What are you doing at the moment?
We've just weeded this bed now
so I'm just raking it down
and flattening it.
You're doing something
very traditional here,
making sure that everything consumed
in the restaurant is produced on the site.
- Does that give you satisfaction?
- Definitely.
It's nice to see all the Victorian ways
and do things
the old-fashioned way of gardening.
Everything here gets done by hand.
- And you can taste the difference?
- Definitely.
You can smell it as well.
Without the Victorian passion
for exploration,
we wouldn't have the huge range of plants
that adorn our gardens today.
And without the railways,
those delicate specimens
could not have arrived swiftly and safety.
In Cornish china clay
I found an industry producing more today
than in Bradshaw's time,
which is pretty rare.
And the pilchard business is reviving,
thanks to a change of name,
reborn as sardine fishing.
What Bradshaw's missed completely
is Cornwall's great beauty,
and thanks to its climate and its garden,
it now attracts those tourists
who look for something more
on their holiday
than sand and ice cream.
Next time I'll be making
a pilgrimage to Perran Sands.
I'm looking for
the lost church of St Piran
but it seems to have got lost again.
Believe it or not, it's here,
right under this granite rock.
I 7! be exploring
Cornwall's last working tin mine.
This thing was put in
before the days of rock drills.
This had to be hand drilled
and then blasted.
And I'll be harvesting oysters
on the Helford River.
That really is exciting.
What an amazing sight.
So it's a cage
absolutely full of bags of oysters?
That's right.
travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw
and his railway guides
inspired the Victorians
to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop,
he told them where to travel
what to see and where to stay.
Now 170 years later
I'm making four long journeys across
the length and breadth of the country
to see what remains of Bradshaw's Britain.
Using my ancient Bradshaw's Guide,
my rail journey has at last
brought me to Cornwall.
The arrival of the railways
in the 19th century
knitted together
Britain's towns and cities.
But even the fastest trains
left Cornwall feeling remote.
I'm hereto look at two industries
that draw on the county's
natural resources.
They're both mentioned in Bradshaw's,
they've survived into modern times,
and one is even staging a revival.
Today I'll be visiting the largest
china clay mines in the world.
MICHAEL: What an extraordinary scene,
like a vast moonscape.
I 7! be seeing
how the Victorian spirit of adventure
shaped British gardens.
We're celebrating the Victorian tradition
of how things were gardened,
the Victorian attitudes to life,
and also the people
who worked in these gardens.
That's what we regard as lost.
And I'll be discovering
what's happened to the humble pilchard.
There is a big demand for pilchards
which has been renamed the "sardine“.
Ah. The sardine and the pilchard
are one and the same, are they?
They are exactly the same.
All this week I've been travelling
from Swindon along the Holiday Line.
After heading south
through Somerset and Devon
I'm now moving into Cornwall.
Here the Great Western Railway
made the whole peninsular
accessible to tourists,
an the way to Penzance.
Today I'll continue west along the coast
from Totnes to Par and St Austell
and push on to Mevagissey.
Bradshaw's commends Cornwall
not for its beauty
but its minerals and says,
“The most important objects in the history
of this county are its numerous mines
which for centuries have furnished
employment to thousands of inhabitants. "
You don't see that Cornwall
from a railway carriage today.
It's more famous for second-homers,
and tourists admiring
its stupendous landscapes,
as I am.
Today I'm in St Germans
and, as usual,
my day begins in a railway carriage.
But this one
isn't actually going anywhere.
Welcome to the travelling post office
where I spent the night.
Now, as you see,
it's fully equipped with a kitchen.
Everything
you could possibly want, I think.
That's where I had my breakfast.
Plenty of room to sit.
The Post Office began sending
the mail by train in the 18305
and soon created special rolling stock
so that letters
could be sorted on the move.
By the early 20th century,
there were around 77 such carriages.
And the service ran right up to 2004.
The kids are going to love this.
Two bunk beds in a sweet little bedroom.
And this leads through to the adults'
bedroom where I spent the night.
Now, is any of you old enough
to remember this?
The leather-strap window.
You pull on the leather strap.
I've been practising that all morning.
You can tell by the change in the design.
And now the pièce de résistance.
Ah-ha.
My own private entrance.
This old travelling post office
is owned by Lizzie and David Stroud,
who also converted the station next door.
I'm Michael. I was your guest last night.
- Pleased to meet you.
- How do you do?
So I take it that this railway station
is actually your home. Is that right?
Yes, that's correct.
We've lived here since 1992.
No, we've got thick double glazing
so it doesn't bother us at all, actually.
No, we've got thick double glazing
so it doesn't bother us at all, actually.
The noise is shielded by the platform.
You only get the sound
of a train as it passes
while in the village you get the sound
as it's coming and going away as well.
So it's actually relatively quiet
living in the station.
I stayed in the travelling post office,
which was very, very nice.
Tell me what's left of it
as a travelling post office.
Because I imagined lots of pigeon holes
where you put the letters.
DAVID: Unfortunately,
when we bought the travelling post office,
that had been stripped out
because it had been lived in as a house.
That's how these old carriages survive.
They get lived in.
MICHAEL: Of course, what you've got
to get used to in a carriage
is that you've got plenty of space
but it's very, very long.
If you're having breakfast
and you've forgotten something,
you've got to prepare
for a very long walk.
It's quite a long track in that one.
It's 48ft long.
The people who come and stay with you,
are they railway nutters?
I mean, let's be frank about this.
There's just such a mix, isn't there?
We get some hardened train spotters
but we also get a lot of families as well.
- Increasingly families, actually.
- Yes.
I know some people
who will be green with envy
that I stayed
in the travelling post office.
I hardly dare tell them
that I've come here.
- Bye-bye.
- Bye.
Today is Sunday
and in Bradshaw's time,
no trains ran between 10am and 4pm
during what was called
the church interval.
Sabbath observance is not what it was
but at small rural stations
like St Germans
Sunday trains are still (are.
I usually use my railway journeys
to catch up on reading Bradshaw's
but this countryside
is just so distracting.
The combination
of forests and green fields
with cows and sheep,
it's just breathtaking.
My next stop is Par,
a small town but nonetheless a hub
for the huge china clay industry.
So this is Par,
and Bradshaw's Guide says,
“A large mining town
in West Cornwall near the sea
with several important mines round it
in the granite,
producing copper and nickel,
with clay and china stone
for the Staffordshire potteries.“
It's difficult to grasp that
the china clay deposits in Cornwall are,
wait for it,
the biggest in the world!
The white porcelain clay
found here in 1746
was of the finest quality
and was in huge demand
in the Staffordshire potteries.
It was originally shipped
northwards by sea
but the railways took over in the 18403
making the process much quicker.
Clay miner Ivor Bowditch works
at one of the oldest pits
which remains highly productive.
- Welcome to clay country.
- Thank you.
What an extraordinary scene,
like a vast moonscape.
Yes, this is the largest china clay pit
probably in the world
covering some 500 acres
and has been operating
for almost 180 years.
I've been following
this 19th century guidebook.
This mine would have existed
when that was written in the 1860s?
Indeed it would.
It opened up in 1830.
And china clay itself had been operated
in Cornwall since 1746.
In Britain we're rather used
to industries being in decline.
How would the output from Cornwall
of china clay compare now
with in Bradshaw's day?
Well, production probably would have been
around the 60,000 tonnes per annum mark.
Today, together with two small
clay-producing companies,
we are seeing
1.5 million tonnes per annum.
That is an absolutely vast increase
from the 19th century.
What has been the new demand in that time?
The main driving factor
has been the use of china clay
in the manufacturing of paper and board.
In fact in the middle 19th century
paper makers found that by adding clay,
they could produce smoother, whiter paper.
And still 50% of our output
goes into paper,
30% into a whole range
of ceramic products,
and the remaining 20%
into markets such as paints,
rubbers, plastics,
sealants and adhesives, pharmaceuticals.
Every day we're handling
something containing clay.
Is it possible to get any closer?
Well, I've got you a hard hat
and a high-vis jacket,
so let's go down and see some action.
Thank you very much.
120 million tonnes of china clay
have been extracted in the past 250 years.
In Bradshaw's day it was flushed
out of the earth with hoses.
The same technique is used today.
but the hoses are much more potent.
Well, this is the operation, Michael.
We have what we call a monitor,
a water cannon,
normally firing
up to 2,000 gallons a minute.
We normally have 12,000 gallons
a minute going through the system.
- What's it doing, then?
- Washing the clay out of the ground.
We're getting the clay
into a solution, as such,
and in its liquid form
we can start to refine it and take out
the non-clay-bearing minerals.
- Would you like to have a go?
- I'd love to.
Come on over.
OK, Michael, you have two levers here.
Very simple.
On the right, vertical movement.
The one on the left,
horizontal movement.
So let me have a go.
This one does left and right.
- Correct.
- Moving to the right.
And this one is up and down.
This water cannon is really
terrifyingly powerful, isn't it?
It's powerful enough
to knock a Land Rover over.
That's how powerful they are.
The watery clay solution
is pumped to a refinery for processing.
Then the pure clay is dried,
ready for transportation.
Well, Michael, we've seen
the power of water here at 300psi.
Let's transfer the power
to 3,500 horsepower
and see a locomotive at work.
Good by me.
The railways were vital to Cornish mining.
and soon a network of lines
criss-crossed the county.
Today many of those routes have closed.
But the massive clay train
to the port of Fowey
still runs along a single track.
And I have the chance to ride on a tine
that rarely transports passengers.
Thank you.
To ensure our safety on the single track,
we're using a system
that Bradshaw would recognise.
We collect a token from the signal box
and since there's only one for the fine,
we know that no train
is running towards us.
The train we're on now,
how many tonnes are we pulling?
1,140 normally.
38 wagons, 30 tonnes a wagon.
MICHAEL: That's fantastic.
How many lorries are we replacing?
IVOR: You'd be looking
at approaching 50 lorries to move that,
so you'd have 100 lorry movements
in both directions.
MICHAEL: How often do the trains set out?
IVOR: They're working daily,
Monday to Friday.
My 19th-century guide talks
about the china clays
being taken
up to the potteries in Staffordshire.
- Does that still happen?
- It does, but not on the same scale.
Sadly, the predominance of the potteries
in Stoke-on-Trent has diminished.
The trains now are all working
to the port of Fowey,
which is the only clay port
operational today.
And they're really at the heart
of our export drive.
85% of our output is export.
Ivor, I very rarely get
to ride in the cab.
It has been really thrilling to do it.
What I hadn't expected was
the fantastic scenery we've had.
I really enjoyed that.
Thank you.
As the clay mines have been exhausted,
they've closed.
Some have been relandscaped
whilst others have been recycled.
This one houses two of the largest
conservatories in the world,
which are part of the Eden Project.
The founders didn't want the biospheres
to dominate the landscape
so they located them in a disused pit.
And helped by a good train service,
the project has become
one of the country's
greenest tourist attractions.
Next I'm travelling just a few miles on
from Par to Mevagissey,
a famous harbour
on the south coast of Cornwall.
- Hello.
- Morning.
- How are you both.
- Very well, thank you.
- Are you visiting Cornwall?
- Yes, we are.
- Isn't it beautiful?
- Fabulous and the weather's marvellous.
Aren't we lucky?
Where are you headed for now?
We're going to St Austell
and then the Lost Gardens of Heligan.
- Ah. I shall be there myself before long.
- Will you?
- Enjoy.
- Thank you. Bye-bye.
If clay was an important natural resource
in Bradshaw's time,
then so, too, was fish.
There are people who do very difficult,
dangerous, maybe dirty jobs
on which the rest of us rely,
maybe for our food.
If you live in a city,
as I have all my life,
you probably don't think much
about that kind of work.
So I'm very pleased today to have
a chance to go out with a fisherman
to get a glimpse
of the very dangerous job that they do.
I'm getting off at St Austell,
because that's as close
as the railway goes to Mevagissey.
Bradshaw describes it as "an important
fishing town in the pilchard season".
In the 19th century, the pilchard industry
provided jobs for thousands of fishermen.
The catch was salted and packaged
in caskets by women
in processing plants
called “pilchard palaces“.
In 1871 the industry reached its peak.
16,000 tonnes of pilchards
were caught, cured,
and transported to Europe by sea
and an over Britain by train.
Andrew Lakeman's family have netted
pilchards here since the 1700s.
- Hello.
- Hello, Michael.
- Let me guess. You're Andrew.
- I am.
- And that kit is for me.
- Yes, it is.
- Welcome to Mevagissey.
- Thank you.
Pilchards are best caught at night
so we're heading out in the evening.
- OK.
- Thank you.
In Bradshaw's day
men called “hewers” would gaze out to sea
to spy where seabirds
were fishing for pilchards,
then send in the boats.
It resulted in some large catches.
Today Andrew's boat uses
more sophisticated technology,
as the skipper explains.
- Skipper, hello.
- Hi. Pleased to meet you.
- Can I interrupt you a minute?
- Yeah. No problem.
- How's the hunt going?
- It's quiet at the moment.
Little bits and pieces of pilchards
but hopefully in the next half an hour,
just as it's coming to dusk,
they'll gather together.
So this is the sonar.
What are we looking for on this screen?
I'm searching at 200m at the moment.
This is the sea floor
ahead of the boat and around the boat
and we're looking for the pilchards
in this black area.
What would they look like?
We're looking for something the size
of a 20 pence piece and blood red.
- What quantity of fish would that be?
- Probably about 5-6 tonnes.
Later on in the year
we'll have marks 200m long,
100 tonnes of fish in.
So obviously we just fish
to what our orders require.
In Britain most pilchards
were sold in tins
and were cheap to buy.
But because they were associated
with wartime rationing,
by the 19503 they became
one of our least popular foods.
Fishermen could earn
only 1.5 pence per kilo.
But in the last 15 years
the humble pilchard
has enjoyed a renaissance.
So is there the demand now for pilchards?
There is a big demand for pilchards
which has been renamed the "sardine“.
Ah. The sardine and the pilchard
are one and the same, are they?
They are exactly the same.
- Really?
- Yes, they are.
But pilchard
makes me think of rusting cans,
and sardine makes me think
of Mediterranean holidays.
Well, you're probably right.
MICHAEL: I mean, the sardine now
is a very chic product, isn't it?
ANDREW: Yes, it is.
It's a very successful species.
It's bought and sold
by all the supermarkets.
We sell large quantities
to wholesalers throughout the country.
So what's in a name? A pilchard
by any other name would smell as sweet.
It's a textbook example
of what marketing or rebranding can do.
Since 1997 pilchards
have been renamed "Cornish sardines"
and the glamorous association
with balmy evenings in southern Europe
has helped pilchard sales to take off.
MICHAEL: The sun's setting.
This is the very time.
That's right. What's it now?
Nearly seven o'clock.
We're looking probably to shoot around
half past seven, something like that.
MICHAEL: That's what I like,
a man who's confident.
I've got the fish here alongside the boat.
We'll be looking
to shoot the net any time.
OK, Matt.
The net cast around the mass of fish
is designed to cut off their escape.
And once in place,
the crew hauls in the catch.
Here they come.
I can see some fish down there.
How many?
Swam.
- You haven't bust any quotas yet.
- No, not yet.
It's a modest harvest.
But it's all pilchards.
Or should I say sardines?
Very good quality fish.
They'll be in the factory tomorrow morning
and be treated in the normal way.
Now I'll think of you out here,
tossing on the wave,
as I sit down to my fish dinner.
In Bradshaw's time,
Mevagissey depended on fishing.
These days it's tourists
that bring in the money.
Indeed, one place just outside Mevagissey
now attracts almost 250,000 people a year.
This is Heligan house and estate.
The house and its owners,
the Tremayne family,
are mentioned in Bradshaw's Guide.
But Bradshaw could not have predicted
the impact that this estate
would have on British gardens.
Today the Lost Gardens of Heligan are
one of the top attractions in Cornwall.
They're looked after by horticulturalist
Philip Macmillan Browse.
Why then is this called
the lost garden of Heligan?
Everybody thinks it was because
the gardens were derelict and overgrown,
and very much so,
and recovering them
was recovering the lost gardens,
which indeed is true,
but in fact,
the reason we called it the lost garden
so that it could be a perennial title
was simply that we were trying
to recover that great surge of activity
at the end of the Victorian era
when gardening and industry
and engineering
and everything was at its peak.
We're celebrating the Victorian tradition
of how things were gardened,
the Victorian attitudes to life,
and also the people
who worked in these gardens.
That's what we regard as lost.
R was places like Heligan
that brought exotic plants
from an over the world to our gardens.
When the owners began
collecting specimens
from adventurous plant hunters
like William Lobb.
He was a Cornishman
and he was the first ever
real commercial plant collector
employed by a nurseryman
to set out and collect
what that nurseryman wanted
for his purposes,
for his commercial gain.
His main task was to go to Chile
and collect huge quantities of seed,
or as much as he could,
of the monkey puzzle tree
which was highly sought after at that time
and they couldn't get enough of it.
He trekked across the Amazon jungle,
up over the Andes
through a snow-filled mountain pass,
down the other side into Chile,
then down the western side of the Andes
to Southern Chile where he found
huge stands of the monkey puzzle tree.
He collected vast quantities of seed.
I think 13,000 trees were actually derived
from the seed he sent back.
Lobb's monkey puzzle seeds
were propagated in England
and the young trees planted at Heligan.
That's the plant up there.
Even an idiot like me can recognise
a monkey puzzle tree.
They're wonderful silhouetted
against the sky here - huge specimens.
Just like in nature in the Andes.
In the 19th century,
the middle classes sought to imitate
the fine gardens of estates like Heligan.
The railways made it practical
for even the owners of humble
suburban gardens a“ over Britain
to order from nursery catalogues
exotic species like monkey puzzles.
Most of these trees
that you see around you
are tree rhododendron species
that are about 150 years old.
And the one just up there in the corner
that you can look at
is rhododendron niveum
which is mauve in colour.
It's very unusual
because it's the same colour
as the first ever artificial dye
which was used by Queen Victoria
in the first instance to dye her dresses
and then picked up by the higher classes
who also found it fashionable.
But because it was so common, eventually,
and mass produced,
then the hoi polloi generally had it
as their fashionable colour.
Even nurses uniforms were made out of it.
And if you belonged to the upper classes
you didn't want to be associated
with the fashions of the lower classes
so you went round your garden
and you eradicated all these plants.
So mauve became unfashionable
which is probably
why you're wearing that colour shin.
- Are you calling me naff'?
- I didn't say that.
Today Heligan preserves species
from around the world
and also sustains an approach to gardening
that's little changed
since Bradshaw's time.
- Hello.
- Hi, there.
Sorry to scare you.
I'm Michael. How are you doing?
OK, yeah. I was just going
to tell you off, actually.
Well, here we are.
What are you doing at the moment?
We've just weeded this bed now
so I'm just raking it down
and flattening it.
You're doing something
very traditional here,
making sure that everything consumed
in the restaurant is produced on the site.
- Does that give you satisfaction?
- Definitely.
It's nice to see all the Victorian ways
and do things
the old-fashioned way of gardening.
Everything here gets done by hand.
- And you can taste the difference?
- Definitely.
You can smell it as well.
Without the Victorian passion
for exploration,
we wouldn't have the huge range of plants
that adorn our gardens today.
And without the railways,
those delicate specimens
could not have arrived swiftly and safety.
In Cornish china clay
I found an industry producing more today
than in Bradshaw's time,
which is pretty rare.
And the pilchard business is reviving,
thanks to a change of name,
reborn as sardine fishing.
What Bradshaw's missed completely
is Cornwall's great beauty,
and thanks to its climate and its garden,
it now attracts those tourists
who look for something more
on their holiday
than sand and ice cream.
Next time I'll be making
a pilgrimage to Perran Sands.
I'm looking for
the lost church of St Piran
but it seems to have got lost again.
Believe it or not, it's here,
right under this granite rock.
I 7! be exploring
Cornwall's last working tin mine.
This thing was put in
before the days of rock drills.
This had to be hand drilled
and then blasted.
And I'll be harvesting oysters
on the Helford River.
That really is exciting.
What an amazing sight.
So it's a cage
absolutely full of bags of oysters?
That's right.