Portal:Devon

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The Devon Portal

ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by the Bristol Channel to the north, Somerset and Dorset to the east, the English Channel to the south, and Cornwall to the west. The city of Plymouth is the largest settlement, and the city of Exeter is the county town
.

Devon has a varied geography. It contains

national landscapes
.

In the Iron Age, Roman and the Sub-Roman periods, the county was the home of the Dumnonii Celtic Britons. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain resulted in the partial assimilation of Dumnonia into the kingdom of Wessex in the eighth and ninth centuries, and the western boundary with Cornwall was set at the Tamar by king Æthelstan in 936. (Full article...)

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Four women wearing dark heavy clothing, bright white aprons, and long white bonnets entirely covering the sides of their heads and protruding forwards over their faces
Bal maidens in traditional protective clothing, 1890

A

, at the south-western extremity of Great Britain. The term has been in use since at least the early 18th century. At least 55,000 women and girls worked as bal maidens, and the actual number is likely to have been much higher.

While women worked in coal mines elsewhere in Britain, either on the surface or underground, bal maidens worked only on the surface. It is likely that Cornish women had worked in metal mining since antiquity, but the first records of female mine workers date from the 13th century. After the

processing ore sent up by the male miners underground. The discovery of cheaper sources of copper in North Wales
in the 1770s triggered a crash in the copper price, and many mines closed.

As the Industrial Revolution began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Welsh metal mines declined and mining in Cornwall and Devon became viable once more. Women and girls were recruited in large numbers for work in ore processing. Women and children accounted for up to half the workers in the area's copper mines. Although machinery was capable of performing much of the work done by bal maidens, the industry grew so quickly that the number of women and girls working grew steadily even though their numbers fell as a proportion of the workforce to 15–20% by 1850. At the peak of the Cornish mining boom, in around 1860, at least 6,000 bal maidens were working at the region's mines; the actual number is likely to have been much higher. While it was not unusual for girls to become bal maidens at the age of six and to work into old age, they generally began at around age 10 or 11 and left work once they married.

From the 1860s, Cornish mines faced competition from cheap metal imports, and legislation introduced in the 1870s limited the use of
Second World War, and a very few female workers after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 banned the practice of recruiting only male mineworkers, women never again performed manual labour in Cornish mines. The last surviving bal maiden died in 1968, and with the closure of South Crofty tin mine in 1998, Cornish metals mining came to an end. (Full article...
)

General images

The following are images from various Devon-related articles on Wikipedia.

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Little Trowlesworthy Tor on Lee Moor, near Cadover Bridge.

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See List of places in Devon for more information

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Smeaton's Tower
Smeaton's Tower

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