The Great Yard, Part Of The Chasewater Railway

The Great Yard, part of the Chasewater Railway, is a coal store built in the early 1850s for the Redruth and Chasewater Railway. It is constructed from killas rubble with some granite quoins, including reused railway sleepers. The structure has an irregular shape that narrows towards the west, with straight walls on the northwest, southwest, and northeast sides, and a polygonal wall on the south. The southwest wall is adjacent to an embankment, while the northeast wall features a large external battered stone pier that originally supported a railway line running on trestles along the length of the compound to the embankment. The northwest wall, which runs parallel to the former track, has five external buttresses, and the northeast wall has two buttresses that were originally intended to support the lateral thrust of eight storage bays inside. In the southern corner of the yard is a former office with a round-on-plan wall, which includes a doorway and three windows. The eastern corner has a wide entrance that is now blocked with rubble walling. This yard was the most significant of the railway's coal yards, used for storing coal and other supplies for local mines.