Carclew: A Monument to Cornish Mining
The dangerous state of a ruined Palladian mansion was a barrier to the restoration of a house and garden once at the centre of the world beating Cornish mining industry. An HHF grant got the project underway.
Today the Palladian mansion house at Carclew near Falmouth is a magnificent ruin, its towering portico a central feature of a 10 hectare garden. The ruins have been on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register since 2017 when the structure became dangerously unstable. Even Historic England describe the efforts of the current owners as a “herculean task” in dealing with the risks posed by the surviving structure of the house. Now a grant from the Historic Houses Foundation will open up the opportunity for further grant aid from Historic England to stabilise the ruin and preserve this important reminder of the Industrial Revolution in Cornwall.
The Lemon family of Carclew were central to the mining industry in Cornwall which brought, not just wealth to the county, but a wave of innovation which was to have a profound effect on the Industrial Revolution in other parts of Britain and the World. William Lemon (1696 -1760) developed tin and copper mines at Gwennap near Redruth, which were described by the mid nineteenth century, as “the richest square mile in the Old World”. After 1740 the rapid growth of the copper industry in Cornwall was fuelled by two factors, innovation and the release of capital through local banks. Innovation came from the inventions of Richard Trevithick whose pioneering steam pumps and trackways allowed deep mining to reach the copper seams and for ore to be transported to the ports of Portreath and Hayle. William Lemon was a founder of the Copper Miners’ Bank in Truro which brough together local landowners for investment in these new technologies in the copper mines.
William Lemon purchased the house at Carclew in 1749 and turned a typical Palladian villa with a central block linked to pavilions into a more substantial mansion with flanking wings. It was a grand and impressive home for a family whose fortune then allowed his son, another William Lemon, to enter parliament and join the ranks of the landed gentry with a baronetcy. Carclew House passed through the generations until it was engulfed by a fierce fire in the early hours of the morning in April 1934. The family, their guests and staff narrowly escaped, leaving the collection of old masters and fine interiors to the mercy of the flames. Much of the ruined West wing survived and the teetering Ionic portico of the house now provides an arresting feature in the gardens today.
The fame of the gardens is thanks to two generations of the Lemon family. Sir William Lemon, 1st Bt surrounded his house with a deer park and “a fine shrubbery and beautiful gardens” which occupied a series of terraces enhanced by walls, water gardens and steps and linked by carefully contrived walks. Sir William was a friend and neighbour of the Tremayne family, creators of nearby gardens known today as The Lost Gardens of Heligan, which were restored in the 1990s. Sir William’s successor, Charles (1784-1868), was a passionate plantsman and founder of the Royal Horticultural Society of Cornwall. In the late nineteenth century, the gardens were particularly celebrated for rare species of rhododendron and azalea. Sir Charles was a sponsor of Sir Joseph Hooker’s three year plant hunting expedition to the Himalayas in 1848, which was the first European expedition to bring rhododendrons to Britain; by 1928 the well-established rhodendron arboretum was considered one of the finest in Cornwall. For over thirty years, Sir Charles’ head gardener was William Beattie Booth, the foremost Victorian expert on camellias, who laid out a camellia walk at Carclew. The hard landscaping and structure of Sir Charles Lemon’s garden, with its rare mature rhodendrons and camellia hybrids, still survives beneath a century’s neglect.
Now, with the essential catalyst of a grant from the Historic Houses Foundation, further funding from Historic England will allow the dangerous structure of the ruined house to be stabilised so that the restoration of the mansion house, a testament to two centuries of the world beating Cornish mining industry, can continue alongside the rediscovery of one of Cornwall’s most important lost gardens. It is a good example of the impact of a small initial grant from the HHF in enabling larger restoration projects.
