The tidal creeks of Roseland have provided sites for the milling of corn for many centuries. At the head of Trethem creek once stood a water mill. The stream which fed it was of sufficient length and flow to support a mill with overshot wheel. Other streams rising from hills and moors in Gerrans and St Anthony could not provide the necessary power for mills of this type – the distance from river to sea is not much over a mile for most of Gerrans and the whole of St Anthony. It was to the tidal waters of the river that the inhabitants turned to provide power for the grinding of their corn. Three tide mills were created in the Percuil River, two in St Anthony and one in Gerrans: at the monastery of Place, at Froe creek on the parish boundary with Gerrans, and at the head of Polingey creek in the latter. Dams were built at the heads of the creeks, the resulting pool filled by the flood tide, while the ebb was controlled so that its run turned the mill wheel. The miller could predict and plan his working hours precisely and was not affected by the vagaries of the weather. Droughts were not a problem and floods could be controlled by the mill sluices. His working hours were of course not regular, moving with the tidal cycle day by day.
It is unlikely that milling alone would have provided a living for the miller and his family in these small parishes. Some millers managed to lease a little land and combine farming with milling. In what might otherwise have been regarded as a remote district, the river was the main thoroughfare, providing easy access to Falmouth. The villagers of Gerrans and St Anthony looked to Falmouth as their nearest town until well into the twentieth century, only the farmers who drove their cattle to market via the ferry at King Harry might have been more familiar with Truro. The river teemed with activity. It was the home port for the trading schooners of the nineteenth century. Every farm with river access had its little landing quay for delivery of lime, coal, etc and the removal of its farm produce. Sanding lanes led down to the river, where wagons could bring ore weed and sand to fertilize the land. More extensive quays were to be found at Percuil and on the St Mawes side of the river, where vessels of considerable size could discharge their cargoes. Here were malthouses, coal sheds and lime kilns. It is not surprising to find that the three tide mills also had substantial quays or piers, enabling the millers to act as merchants for the commerce of the area.
It was not until 1951 that the church relinquished the last remnants of its huge ancient manor of Tregaire. In Gerrans parish a number of tenements, including six farms and the site of the old tide mill at Polingey, which had passed from the Bishopric of Exeter to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1853, were sold into private hands.
No trace of a mill or mill house survives at any of these sites. Froe is most clearly recognizable, as its dam is intact and a sluice still allows water to be retained in the pool at all states of the tide. In 1809 the lease of Froe Mill was advertised in the Royal Cornwall Gazette for 99 years, described as “water grist mills, with a new built dwelling house with kitchen and walled garden. The mills worth the attention of flour dealers, being well watered, and erected on such a construction as to be rarely equalled.” The newly-built house was presumably the present Froe House, not destined for long to be the home of the miller.
The dam & sluice at Froe
Both the census of 1841 and the Tithe Apportionment of 1840 record the miller at Froe as William Dowrick. At that time Froe formed part of the estate of Sir Samuel T Spry of Place. Ten years later William Dowrick was still the miller. While there is no further record of a miller at Froe in the censuses, the Post Office Directory lists John Blight as miller at “Frow” in 1856. The grist mill was unoccupied in 1871 and the house unoccupied in 1881. By 1891 the occupants were of independent means and the nearby cottage was the home of a fisherman. While milling had ceased to be an economic occupation by mid-nineteenth century, the quays continued to be used until well into the present century. Roadstone in particular was delivered here by barge from the quarries of the Lizard within living memory.
Charles Henderson records that in 1140 the whole of the parish of St Anthony was given by Bishop Robert of Exeter to the Priory of Plympton. The priory set up a cell at St Anthony, a small monastery with a church dedicated in 1150. Henderson states that until the Reformation a prior and one monk constituted the cell of St Anthony. A small grange was established and the mill created by building a causeway across the head of the little bay of Place.
Leland, around 1538 saw Place Mill from St Mawes and described it as follows: “half a mile from the hedde of this downward to the haven is a creke in manner of a poole with a round mark made on the charte on which is a mille grinding with the tyde.” At the dissolution the monastery was destroyed, together with part of the church but the mill appears to have been spared. The lands of St Anthony were granted to Henry Thomas, yeoman, in 1540 and thereafter passed through various hands, including Sir Francis Vyvyan of Trelowarren. Place was sold by the Vyvyans to the ancestors of the present owners, the Sprys, in the mid seventeenth century.
A Tudor house was erected on the site of the monastery; eighteenth and early nineteenth century drawings show the house to have been extended and altered, exhibiting a front elevation of simple classical lines. The mill and mill pool continued to occupy the immediate prospect between the house and river until 1862 when, having entirely rebuilt the house Sir Samuel Spry had the pool filled in to create a lawn, the mill demolished and a new causeway built seaward of the old.
Place House showing the new causeway, the lawn behind was once the mill pool
There are several references to this mill in the Spry papers. In 1718 it is described as a corn or grist mill with a house, pier and quay. It was advertised to be let in 1812 and again in 1848. The censuses record that in 1841 Thomas Allen, miller lived there with his wife Amey and five children. In the Tithe Apportionment of the same date he is recorded as occupying, with others, several houses in the vicinity of the mill. Indeed, in 1851 the census enumerator writes of “the village of Mill,” undoubtedly an exaggeration, but nevertheless indicating a small cluster of buildings at the waters edge at that time. There would seem to have been five houses there and one in process of building. William Parkyn was then the miller, described also as a farmer employing one labourer, presumably his nephew Thomas Daniel, who lived with him.
By 1861 the miller, now James Borlase, no longer inhabited the mill house. He lived at nearby Cellars cottage with his wife and 3 year old daughter, no doubt contemplating employment elsewhere, as within a year the mill and pool were no more.
The Old Tide Mill, Gerrans (Polingey Mill) by William Pitt (1818-1900) (courtesy of Elford Fine Art)
Polingey mill stood at the head of the shorter of the two creeks which feed into the northern extremity of the Percuil river. Henderson quotes a variety of references to the mill in his “Topography of Powder”, the earliest dated 1416. Sometimes referred to as Gerrans or Tregassick Mill, it was best approached by the little highway leading to the west bank via Polhendra and Lanhay. A farm track led down to the opposite bank from Tregassick . All three were Bishop’s farms. Villagers from nearby Gerrans could reach the mill easily via Well Lane and the Way Field. All that remains of this mill is a mound midstream, a ruined causeway negotiable at low tide, on the Gerrans side traces of the foundations of a quay can be discerned in the sand and in the stream is a section of the wheel shaft with an iron band around it.
Polingey Creek with the remains of the mill wall still visible. The Mill house would have been midstream. (courtesy of Helen Ralfs)
The Court Books of the Manor of Tregayre contain many references to the mill copyholders, though it is unlikely that those named necessarily worked the mill themselves. The earliest name is that of Anthony Cruse, who in a survey of 1662 held one salt water mill, worth yearly £10. He also held a messuage worth £26. This armigerous family of Gerrans was to disappear from parish records by the end of the century. We can presume that an undertenant lived at the mill. In 1759 a George Ennis held the mill and continued to do so until 1793, when he surrendered it to James West. While George Ennis was evidently a man of some standing in the parish – he was viewer of repairs for the Bishop – he is not to be confused with the Enys of Enys near Penryn. I have found no evidence that any member of that family resided in this very small part of their enormous estates. George Ennis’s father, Joseph, had acquired the lease of farmland from Enys in 1752; George’s daughters married prosperous farmers in the parish – Incledon and Cock. It is fairly certain that the miller was an undertenant.
The first miller I can identify at Polingey is William Rowe, described as tenant in 1790, when the lease of “Tregassick Mills, commonly called Polingey Mills in Gerrans” was advertised. The sale was to take place at the house of Mr William Pearce, innkeeper at Gerrans Churchtown. In the early years of the nineteenth century Henry Merrifield was the miller. The principal holder of the Bishop’s lands in Gerrans and neighbouring parishes at that time was the much esteemed John Penhallow Peters of Crigmurrian in Philleigh, gentleman, farmer and innovative breeder of cattle and sheep. Henry Merrifield is shown as underlessee of the salt water mill in a valuation of these lands. This able young man, who was acting as reeve for the Bishop in 1819, was not to survive long at the Mill. In the West Briton of 27th October 1820 appeared the following announcement: “On Thursday evening as a man named Merrifield, who kept a mill near St Mawes, was crossing Falmouth harbour in a boat, with another man and a woman named Menear, the boat was upset by a squall, when opposite Merrifield’s house, and he and the woman were unfortunately drowned; the other man happily reached the shore. Merrifield’s wife was standing on the beach when the accident happened and saw her husband sink without being able to obtain assistance for him.” He was 29 years old.
It would appear that the Merrifield family continued in occupation of the mill until the arrival of Joshua Rosevear around 1834. Joshua had been born at Sticker near St Austell in 1811, where, according to his obituary in the Bible Christian Magazine, at the age of twenty-four “finding his business (as a miller) not prospering... he took a little salt water mill at Gerrans, and here he proved to be the right man in the right place.” Whether he prospered as a miller at this time of decline of small scale milling is questionable, but he was influential in the establishment of the Bible Christian connection in Gerrans. At their little mill house he and his wife provided “a little chamber with bed, table, stool and candlestick” for visiting preachers. Grateful visitors wrote verses of appreciation on the walls of this room. Joshua himself was a local preacher of some repute.
His life was not without tragedy. In August 1846 his daughter, Sophia, aged three was found drowned in the millpool. Local legend has it that two children of the last miller of Polingey were drowned in the mill pool, named Dowrick, and that this occasioned the demise of the mill. I have found no record of this and assume that confusion arose between this incident and the occupation of Froe Mill by the Dowricks. Grace Ann Rosevear of Polingey Mill aged 16 died in 1850 but there is no mention of the cause of her death, whether by disease or accident.
In 1848 Mr Penhallow Peters advertised “the estate of Polingey Mill, now in occupation of Mr Joshua Rosevear, as yearly tenant.” He was looking for an underlessee to take the property for three lives, according to the custom of the manor. A considerable sum was said to have been lately expended on the mill house and premises. It appears to have been taken by Michael Henry Williams, as he surrendered the tenement in 1889. The condition of the mill cannot have recommended itself to a prospective lessee: in a survey of 1853 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners noted that the state of the mill was very poor. It consisted of a small house of three rooms and two garrets, with a small grist mill, one pair of stones. Of stone and cob, worked by tidal water.
Joshua Rosevear remained at the mill for a few more years - he was there in 1851, described as master miller, with his wife and three children. In the 1861 and 71 censuses the sea mill was uninhabited. Joshua and his family had removed to the nearby Lanhay farm, where he died in 1884. One of the millstones is embedded in the platform at the top of the steps of the old barn there. With the departure of the Rosevears the mill deteriorated, although the ruined walls of the cottage are remembered by octogenarians living today. The state of the premises was well described by the tenant of Polingey House, on the west bank of the creek in 1893. “The mill is situated in the middle of the creek with a road connecting the two shores with water above and below at high tides. The sea runs up and down through an opening about four feet wide and the current is very swift and strong and is breaking the stonework away across the opening there is only a single stone about eighteen inches wide and that is in a very dangerous position with no railings to keep anyone from falling overboard. On this stone my children has to pass to go to school. I have five young children under eleven years of age and when the wind is very high they have frequently to crawl across the stone on their hands and knees. …. the mill is unoccupied and in ruins and no house within sight.”
One small reminder of the working mill was a saw in the possession of my grandfather Frederick Chenoweth. It was used to cut the applewood to make the cogs for the mill wheel at Polingey. Sadly, this too has not survived. The advent of more efficient methods of grinding corn, together with improved communication, particularly by rail, hastened the demise of the country’s ancient salt and fresh water mills. Those in Gerrans and St Anthony had ceased to work by the middle of the nineteenth century, with little trace remaining of many centuries on industry and commerce.
Article © Hilary Thompson 2006
Reproduced with the kind permission of Hilary and with thanks to Helen Ralfs for the transcription of Hilary's article.
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