Gunnislake

Gunnislake is a village in east Cornwall, on the western side of the Tamar valley and across the river from Devon, about 10 miles north of Plymouth. It is in the civil parish of Calstock and has its own electoral ward. The population was 4,574 at the 2011 census. It is outside Dartmoor National Park.

New Bridge, built about 1520, has seven granite arches and is 182 feet long. It was the lowest bridging point on the Tamar until the Saltash bridge opened in 1962. In 1644 a Civil War fight took place at the bridge, which the Parliamentarians won; accounts give about 40 Parliamentarian casualties against about 200 Royalists killed or taken.

The village grew with mining in the middle of the 19th century, when the Tamar valley was the richest copper mining centre in Europe. Mining across the valley gave about 7,000 jobs at its peak in 1862, and arsenic working at Greenhill went on until at least 1930. Miners' cottages and mine ruins are still there. St Anne's church was consecrated in 1880, and Gunnislake station is the northern end of the Tamar Valley Line (moved in 1994 to remove a low road bridge). Mary Ellen Smith, later the first woman cabinet minister in the British Empire, was born here in 1863.