Sourton Tors Ice Works

The Sourton Tors Ice Works lies on the north-west slope of Sourton Tors, above Prewley Moor, at about 1,300 to 1,400 feet. From about 1875 water from a hillside spring was led into rows of shallow ponds cut into the slope and left to freeze. The ice was cut into blocks and kept in a store on the site until it could be carted away. Most of it went to Plymouth, where fishmongers used it to keep fish.

The works were the venture of James Henderson, a Truro mining engineer. In 1874 he asked the Duchy of Cornwall for 75 acres at £15 a year and was refused; in 1875 he took a 21-year lease on 5 acres at £10 a year plus twopence a ton. There were five rows of ponds, each about 3 feet deep and 30 feet long and divided into shorter sections, and an ice house about 60 feet by 20 feet, with a cutting through the bank on its north side so that wagons could leave downhill towards Sourton.

The output depended on the winter. The first season gave little. The winter of 1878 to 1879 gave a large crop, with 171 tons sent to Plymouth and 20 tons to Exeter, and about 300 tons were sold from the following winter. Mild winters gave too little ice, hard ones made the ponds and the roads difficult to work, and mechanical refrigeration was arriving in Plymouth. An attempt to sell the works at auction failed, and under the lease the ponds were filled in. Accounts differ on the closing date: the Devonshire Association's Industrial Archaeology Section gives 1882, John Weir and Brian Le Messurier say the works lasted about ten years, and a 1988 paper in the Association's Transactions dates them 1874 to 1886. William Crossing, writing in 1902, noted that the operations on the common above Sourton were not of long continuance.

What remains is a set of banks and hollows where the ponds were, and the ruin of the store. The American army dug over much of the site during the Second World War. Clive Gunnell placed the works beside a row of granite posts on the King Way, the two set widest apart being known as the Iron Gates. Dartefacts records five uninscribed boundstones around the site; No.01, the most easterly, has its own listing.

• Period: Victorian, from about 1875
• Status: Scheduled monument (Historic England list entry 1019570)
• Height: about 1,300 to 1,400 feet
• Grid reference: SX 54602 90008 (approximate)
• Also known as: the Ice Factory; Icework at Sourton Tors