IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Caradon View, LISKEARD, PL14 5LL

At the heart of the hamlet of Minions are three establishments all willing and eager to sell you food. Here is one of them. Walking on Bodmin Moor is hungry work.

Looking across a common where friendly, very woolly sheep keep the grass on this highly uneven ground in trim, to "Hurler's Halt" café selling cream teas etc. Opposite the café and hidden by the trees in this photo is Minion's pub, The Cheesewring Hotel, named after a nearby stone outcrop on Bodmin Moor. (see Image])

No mining community would have been complete without a chapel. The inscription on the front of the building reads "P.M CHAPEL 1863". I would assume that means it was a Primitive Methodist chapel built in 1863. It has now been converted into private residential accommodation.

More or less identical to Image, and unachanged in eight years, but a chance to quote from http://www.historic-cornwall.org.uk/cisi/minions/CISI_Minions_report.pdf : " in the second half of the nineteenth century Minions accommodated two chapels ... The larger of the two chapels is the former Primitive Methodist Chapel. It was built in 1863 when the majority of industry-related building took place in the village. Originally the chapel would have been positioned a small distance from the track joining the Gonamena Incline, but in 1877 the new railway line was constructed hard behind it. The essential character of the building still remains; the high pitched roof with original slates, tall lancet windows on the façade, the date stone and the original low front wall with railings. The chapel is now however a domestic building, the walls and quoins have been painted and there are velux windows in the roof."

On the edge of Bodmin Moor.

A terrace of miners cottages by the site of the crossing of the Liskeard & Caradon Railway with the road from Redgate to Upton Cross and Rilla Mill

With the discovery of major copper lodes on the flanks of Caradon Hill and the establishment of mining along with granite quarrying and a railway in mid 19th century this remote moorland suddenly became an industrial boom area with shanty settlements springing up as workers moved into the area, mostly from west Cornwall. The village of Minions, originally known as "Cheesewring Railway" was one of the villages built as a more permanent replacement for temporary shacks. Photographed here is a row of workers' cottages in the village.