Turner painted it in 1815. The picture is called Crossing the Brook, and the brook in question is actually the River Tamar, and the slender granite bridge at the center of the composition is the Newbridge at Gunnislake - built around 1520, 182 feet long, seven arches of large regular granite blocks. Nikolaus Pevsner called it the finest of the Cornish granite bridges. Forty-eight years after Turner exhibited the painting, a girl named Mary Ellen Smith was born here in 1863. She would emigrate to British Columbia, enter politics, and in 1921 become the first woman to hold a cabinet post anywhere in the British Empire. Gunnislake, then as now, was a village that punched harder than its size suggested.
Gunnislake sits in the civil parish of Calstock, just inside Cornwall, with the River Tamar forming the boundary with Devon to the east. Plymouth is about ten miles south. The village is part of the Tamar Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a designation that protects the steep wooded slopes and the surviving industrial archaeology along the river. The 2011 census put the population at 4,574. The demographic profile leans slightly younger than the Cornish average - 18.2 percent children versus 17.3 percent across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly - and slightly fewer pensioners. The village has its own weeklong festival each summer, held annually since 2001, and a non-league football club playing in the Cornish Duchy League Premier.
The valley around Gunnislake has been contested ground for a long time. Hingston Down, rising just north of the village, is generally accepted as the location of the battle recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 835 - corrected by later scholars to 838 - in which Egbert, king of the West Saxons, defeated an alliance of Cornish Britons and Danish Vikings. Much more recently, archaeologists from the University of Exeter identified a significant Roman fort on the outskirts of Calstock just downriver, the largest known Roman site in Cornwall. In 1644, during the English Civil War, Royalist and Parliamentarian forces clashed at the Newbridge itself in what is now called the Battle of Gunnislake New Bridge.
Everything about modern Gunnislake comes back to the nineteenth century, and to copper, tin, and arsenic. At the peak of the mining boom in 1862, the mines of the Tamar Valley employed around 7,000 people. Gunnislake stood among the richest mining districts in Europe. Brickworks and quarries operated alongside the mines. Kit Hill, Morwellham Quay, Cotehele, and Calstock were all worked, with raw materials moving by river barge down the Tamar to Plymouth and the wider world. Arsenic - extracted from arsenopyrite as a byproduct of tin and copper - was still being produced at Greenhill, Gunnislake until at least 1930. By that time the great mining wave had long since broken, and most of the engine houses, leats, and tramways had passed into ruin. The Gunnislake Clitters engine house still stands above the Tamar, one of the most photographed industrial monuments in the valley.
By the late 1870s the village had grown large enough to need its own church, and the people of Gunnislake set about building one. The land was bought on 29 January 1879. The total construction cost came to £2,400 - the Duke of Bedford contributed £500, the Church Building Society £200, and the rest was raised locally. On the afternoon of Tuesday, 30 September 1879, the Dowager Countess of Mount Edgcumbe laid the foundation stone at three o'clock. The architect was J Piers St Aubyn. Edward Benson, Bishop of Truro, consecrated the finished church in 1880. The dedication to St Anne was chosen because of an ancient holy well close to the site. The church seats 225. In 1918 the parishioners tried to break away from Calstock and form their own separate parish, but they could not raise the necessary endowment, and the link to Calstock has held to this day.
The railway came to Gunnislake in 1872, eventually running north to Callington as part of the East Cornwall Mineral Railway and its successors. The line carried ore down to Plymouth, then passengers as the mines declined. In 1966 the section north of Gunnislake closed, making the village the new terminus of what is now the Tamar Valley Line. In 1994 the station was moved a short distance to remove a low road bridge that had restricted modern trains. The line still runs today, threading along the river through Calstock and Bere Ferrers down to Plymouth. From time to time proposals surface to reopen the old Tavistock-to-Plymouth route on the Devon side, which would shorten journey times but might draw traffic away from the Cornish line. The wrestling tournaments that used to draw crowds to the Tavistock Inn are gone, and the heavyweight champion of the Transvaal in 1910 - W Littlejohn of Gunnislake, known as 'tiny' at 220 pounds - is gone too. The bridge that Turner painted is still there.
Gunnislake sits at 50.524N, 4.213W, on the steep Cornish bank of the River Tamar about 10nm north of Plymouth. Recommended viewing altitude 1,500-3,000 feet AGL. The river itself is the most obvious landmark, threading southwest from Tavistock down to Plymouth Sound through a deeply incised wooded valley. The Newbridge (the granite 1520 structure) and the Gunnislake Clitters engine house above the river are key visual targets. The Hingston Down Quarry asphalt tower is now prominent on the skyline north of the village. Nearest airfield is Plymouth (EGHO) about 9nm south; Exeter (EGTE) about 30nm east-northeast. The valley can hold mist in early mornings; Tamar Bridge and Plymouth Sound to the south are good navigation references.