Perran Well is situated in a deep valley, having a hill and a corresponding vale on either side, terminating in the Carnon branch of Falmouth harbour: over all these the high road leading from Truro to Falmouth used to pass; but by a most judicious improvement a causeway has been laid over Carnon, and these transverse hills and valleys entirely avoided.
Not far below the village stood one of the tin-smelting houses constructed after the Germans introduced reverberatory furnaces; it has been used for the last thirty years for refining arsenic. This metal and its oxide, most destructive to animal or to vegetable life, is extensively useful in metallurgic operations and in the arts. Few substances are more generally diffused throughout mining districts: it unites with most other metals, sometimes alone, but more frequently in union with sulphur, and converts them into minerals. Metals are therefore said to be mineralized by arrenic, by sulphur, &c. The first operation used in extracting metals from their ores, is one for driving off by heat such substances as are volatile. Arsenic is eminently so: it therefore sublimes, and is deposited in long flues or chambers made to prevent the destructive
consequences of its being diffused through the atmosphere, and scattered over the country. From these chambers or flues the refiners of arsenic obtain their supplies, and are thereby enabled to afford it in a state of purity, at such prices as would be wholly inadequate for defraying the expense necessarily to be incurred, if the operation had commenced on the ores containing this metal in the mines.
Partly in this parish, but principally in Milor, on the next creek towards Falmouth, are situated the great iron works, conducted by Messrs. Fox, a family distinguished for ability, exertion, and liberality, from generation to generation. These works were the first constructed of any magnitude in Cornwall. Previously, all the cast-iron materials for steam engines were brought from Glamorganshire, and the working of an important mine very frequently depended on the uncertain direction of the wind; now every thing that can be required, even cylinders of the largest dimensions, seven feet and a half (90 in.) in diameter, and ten or twelve feet long, are cast and bored with the utmost accuracy here and at Hoyle, where similar works have arisen, to the incalculable benefit of the mining concerns.
The valley above and below these works is perhaps the most beautiful in the west of Cornwall, and it has recently been adorned, just opposite the fine woods of Carclew, by the elegant and tasteful residence of Benjamin Sampson, esq. who conducts an extensive manufactory for supplying the mines with gunpowder made in their immediate neighbourhood.
This parish, and the adjacent one of Stithyans, to which it is annexed, are believed to have been appropriated to the religious establishment at Penrey. The impropriation of the great tithes, and the advowson of the vicarage, have for a considerable time belonged to the Boscawens of Tregothnan.
Perran Arworthall measures 1,229 statute acres.
| £. | s. | d. | |
| Annual value of the Real Property, as returned to Parliament in 1815 | 2165 | 0 | 0 |
| Poor Rate in 1831 | 451 | 15 | 0 |
| Population,— | |||
| in 1801, 884 | in 1811, 1104 | in 1821, 1362 | in 1831, 1504 |
giving an increase of 70 per cent. in 30 years.