Sparkwell

Sparkwell is a village and civil parish in the South Hams district of Devon, between Plymouth and Dartmoor. Ivybridge is the nearest town, about 5 miles away. The village is outside the National Park: the Hemerdon tungsten mine, about 1.2 km north-west of the village, is described as just outside the boundary. The parish also takes in Hemerdon, Lee Mill, Venton, Elfordleigh, Smithaleigh and Mount Pleasant, and the 2021 census counted 1,425 people.

It was once part of Plympton St Mary. All Saints church is a stone building put up in 1859, and in 1884 Sparkwell and its neighbouring hamlets were made an ecclesiastical parish of their own. The civil parish was renamed from Plympton St Mary to Sparkwell on 28 December 1966. The Treby Arms was already an inn in 1870, when John Sandover kept it, and was later run by the MasterChef winner Anton Piotrowski. Dartmoor Zoological Park, on the edge of the village, was the subject of Benjamin Mee's book and the film We Bought a Zoo.

Tungsten was found at Hemerdon in 1867 and worked during both world wars, then again by Wolf Minerals from 2015 to 2018. No dated history of the village before the 1859 church has turned up in the sources read.