On the moors above St. Just is a stark grey ruin; a labyrinth of concrete tanks, pipes and conduits covering the hillside, presenting a formiddable sillhouette against the sky.
A large door in the wall nearest the road opens on to a furnace room with three fireboxes and a set of steps leading onto a huge kiln chamber spanning the length of the works and with a chimney at one end. A series of chambers lead off the near (east) wall, but access to the rest of the site is by climbing the 8' wall and walking along it to the upper settling beds where the only route is accross the narrow walls separating the tanks. This is no easy feat; high winds seek to topple the unwary into the gorse outside or else back into the deep tanks below, some filled with mud or thorns, others floored with hard, unforgiving concrete.
Leswidden China Clay Works opened in the 1890s on a site which is now used by a blockworks, but lasted only a few years before closure. It was reopened by McClaren China Clays shortly after the turn of the last century and
it was possibly at about this time that the upper works, the site that we visited, was built.
Working continued until the 1920s after which the works was presumably stripped of machinery and the steel or asbestos roofing which covered the buildings.