Calstock

Calstock is a village and civil parish in south-east Cornwall, on the River Tamar, which here forms the border with Devon. It is about 6 miles south-west of Tavistock and 10 miles north of Plymouth, outside Dartmoor National Park. The parish had 6,253 residents at the 2011 census.

A Roman fort of about AD 50 to 55 was found near St Andrew's church in 2008, the third known in Cornwall and the largest. In the 19th century the river carried copper and tin from the area, and Kelly Quay had wharves and stores from 1859. The railway viaduct was built between 1904 and 1907 by Galbraith and Church as part of the Bere Alston and Calstock Light Railway. It has twelve spans of 60 feet, stands about 120 feet high and is made of concrete blocks, and it is Grade II* listed. A wagon hoist beside it took goods down to the quay until 1934.

Market gardening grew with the railway. By 1906 strawberries made 200 to 300 tons a year in the parish, and daffodils took over later, with about 350,000 boxes of flowers and fruit sent by rail in the 1950s and 1960s. A former brickworks became a chip basket factory around 1920 and ran until 1985. A solar powered ferry restarted in May 2025, according to Wikipedia. Little is recorded in the sources checked about the village before the Roman fort and the mining.