Qualla: Wheal Martyn

Wheal Martyn: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AtticTapestry, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two days for the slurry to thicken to twelve percent solids in the settling pits. Two or three months in the larger tanks before the clay reached thirty percent. Then heat from below in the pan kiln, coal fires running through underground flues, drying the cake in one to three days depending on how close it sat to the firebox. A china clay works was a machine for separating fine white kaolin from the granite sand it weathered out of, and the machinery ran on patience as much as power. At Wheal Martyn, two miles north of St Austell, the whole apparatus survives almost intact, the only complete Victorian clay works left standing in the world.

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Image: AtticTapestry | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wheal Martyn: The Martyn Brothers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John M, CC BY-SA 2.0. Richard Martyn bought the Carthew Estate in 1790, when china clay was still a new industry in Cornwall. His son Elias started the Wheal Martyn works on the family land in the 1820s, expanding into a serious operation by the 1840s with five pits in production. By 1869 Wheal Martyn...

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Image: John M | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wheal Martyn: The Eighteen-Foot Wheel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Foodista, CC BY 2.0. The most impressive surviving machine on the site is a waterwheel of 18 feet in diameter, built around 1902, still in place and turning when the museum operators choose to set water on it. Its job was to drive a slurry pump that moved liquid clay around the site between settling ...

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Image: Foodista | CC BY 2.0

Wheal Martyn: The Pan Kiln

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janet Ramsden, CC BY 2.0. Walk into the pan kiln and the scale of the operation becomes obvious. A long, low building floored with iron plates, with flues running underneath that carried hot gases from coal-fired furnaces at one end. Workers raked dewatered clay across the heated plates in shallow layers,...

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Image: Janet Ramsden | CC BY 2.0

Wheal Martyn: Preserved by Charity

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AtticTapestry, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wheal Martyn became a museum in 1975, established as a charity with John Stengelhofen as its first director. The 26-acre grounds include not just the preserved works but a Site of Special Scientific Interest, designated for the geological exposures that show how kaolinization act...

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Image: AtticTapestry | CC BY-SA 4.0