Greensplat

Greensplat lies in south Cornwall, just west of Carthew and north of St Austell. It sits in the heart of the china clay area, where the name comes from Green’s Plat, a nearby mine shaft. The settlement once stretched along a north–south line, split into three parts by the old clay workings. Most of its buildings dated from the Victorian age, though a few older cottages survived from farming and tin streaming days. A Methodist chapel and Sunday School stood at its centre until they were removed in 1997. The village’s end came when the Wheal Martyn china clay quarry expanded and swallowed the whole centre. Railway carriage homes once stood among the terraces, but they too were demolished. The last house to go was Kenwyn, marked with red spray paint urging ‘Do Not Demolish’. After the bulldozers left, only one semi-detached cottage remained at South Greensplat, surrounded by nearly forty hectares of empty land. Today the empty streets lie quiet under open sky. Old Pound, Ruddlemoor and Carthew are the nearest places where people still live. The story of the lost village is told in Henry Buckton’s book The Lost Villages. Greensplat itself is now just a name on maps and a memory in the clay-pitted landscape.