This parish, like the other dedicated to St. Stephen, has a lofty
tower placed, with the church, in a position commanding the adjacent
country, which retains, however, much of its former character; yet
cultivation is gradually extending itself here, as in other wild
tracts of Cornwall, through the medium of potatoe cultivation; but if
the mines should fail, or if the system itself goes to a great extent,
we have a tremendous example before our eyes of the inevitable
consequences resulting from this subdivision of property.
The church contains but one monument of any curiosity, and that is to
the memory of Doctor Hugh Wolrige, a physician who died in 1652.
Ingenuas didicit (quas optimè coluit) artes;
Ægrotis didicit pharmaca sana dare,
In Christo didicit tantum succumbere morti,
Desinit ulterius discere Doctor Hugo.
This is accompanied by an English inscription in quaint rhymes, from
which it appears, that after quitting Cambridge he went to complete
his medical education at Breda, where the miasmata of that unhealthy
country so injured his constitution as to close his days at the early
period of thirty years.
The epitaph states him to have been born at Penkevill, but the family
were seated at Garlenick in Creed, and there, eighty years afterwards,
John Wolrige, esq. is found among the subscribers to Martyn’s Map of
Cornwall, but deceased before the map appeared in 1748.
St. Stephen’s in Brannel measures 8,556 statute acres.
Annual value of the Real Property, as £. _s._ _d._
returned to Parliament in 1815 6696 0 0
Poor Rate in 1831 1190 5 0
Population, { in 1801, | in 1811, | in 1821, | in 1831,
{ 1738 | 1904 | 2479 | 2477
giving an increase of 42½ per cent. in 30 years.
It may be remarked, that the increase was rather more in the first
twenty years, an anomaly in all likelihood occasioned by the
fluctuation in mining concerns, and to the preparation of China clay
having reached its limit.
If the increase had uniformly continued for a century at this rate,
the population at the end of that time would reach the great number of
14,635.