History of the Parish

Parish history

🌿 The name Lanner comes from the Cornish Lannergh (opens in a new tab), meaning “a clearing”, and there are traces of settlement here going back to the Bronze Age. In the 13th century the Bishop of Exeter enclosed woodland in this area to make a deer park, and Lanner was being recorded by name by 1542. For centuries it was a scatter of farmsteads and tinners’ homes within the ancient parish of Gwennap, and at the start of the 19th century the village is said to have had just six cottages.

⛏️ Then came copper. Gwennap was once described as “the richest square mile in the Old World”, and on Lanner’s doorstep Tresavean Mine (opens in a new tab) became Cornwall’s third-largest copper producer, employing more than 1,300 people by 1836. Its most productive years were in the first half of the 19th century, and the village grew rapidly around it.

⚙️ Tresavean was also a place of firsts. In 1842 Michael Loam built the first man engine (opens in a new tab) to work in Britain here, a system of moving rods and platforms that carried miners up and down the shaft instead of making them climb ladders. The mine eventually reached 443 fathoms (about 2,660 feet), making it the second-deepest in Cornwall, and after it reopened in 1907 it became the first in Cornwall to be drained by electric turbine pumps.

📉 Lanner was made a parish in its own right in 1844, taken out of Gwennap to serve its growing population. The boom did not last. Copper collapsed in the 1860s and, as the mines declined, people moved away: the population (opens in a new tab) fell from 2,710 in 1851 to 1,813 by 1881. Tresavean was worked on and off for decades more before finally closing in the late 1920s.

💧 The village carried on. Maude’s Water, the drinking fountain in the Square, brought a clean water supply in 1901 after a campaign by Maude Pascoe of Penstruthal, and the village war memorial was unveiled in 1920. New housing (opens in a new tab) (PDF, 3.4 MB) from the 1960s helped the population recover, the former Tresavean mine site was opened up for public access in the 1980s, and the present civil parish, with its own parish council, was created on 1 April 1985. The Tresavean Trail, the playing fields and the surviving engine houses are reminders of the mining age.