Name: FOXHOLE & CARPALLA
Council: Restormel District Council
Location: Mid-west Cornwall, in the clay lands about four miles north-west of St Austell
Main period of industrial settlement growth: From mid 18th century; c 1900.
Study Area: Hensbarrow
NGR: SW 96663 54327 (centre)
Main industry: China clay/china stone 

Industrial history and significance
The area around Foxhole/Carpalla was one of the first to be developed for china stone and china clay in the late 18th century; and had already had a long history of tin streaming and mining; it subsequently remained close to the heart of one of the largest and longest-surviving clay working areas in Hensbarrow. But Foxhole/Carpalla took nearly 150 years before it changed markedly. Unlike Nanpean, which began to develop into a recognisable village and service centre by the mid 19th century, Foxhole/Carpalla was still in the 1880s an unconnected string of farms, smallholdings and individual cottages along the main local road. Only with a spurt of house building in and around 1900 did it become a recognisable village, and it remains scarcely fully joined up even today. The provision of anything other than housing in Foxhole/Carpalla remained very limited (a school, a single chapel, club, 2 or 3 shops) – it was not like the churchtown-style settlement at Nanpean, but much more simply a dormitory settlement for the clay and railway workers, and the old farms and cottages remain a principal element in the make-up of the settlement. This is a distinctly local pattern of events that merits further research to establish the process and timing involved, particularly as an instructive counter to the accepted view of an explosive and immediate response of settlement to industry in Cornwall.

Downloads:

The downloads offered below represent the different elements of the CISI Foxhole Report including the core text and the four illustrative map figures
 

Title	Description	Format	Size
CISI Foxhole report	Report text.		1153kb
Figure 1	Location map		395kb
Figure 2a	Historical development map		325kb
Figure 2b	"		264kb
Figure 3a	Surviving historical components map		279kb
Figure 3b	"		210kb
Figure 4a	Gazetteer sites, existing designations and recommendations map		347kb
Figure 4b	"		292kb

Last Updated: 16/12/2004. © Cornwall County Council, Historic Environment Service.