Porthleven lies in the Hundred and Deanery of Kerrier. The name itself is taken from two Cornish words, Porth, meaning Port, and Elvan, which was the name of the Celtic Saint who came to shore in the 5th century, and along with others began preaching Christianity in the region. There is a village called St Elvan, which lies in the Parish of Sithney, just over a mile from Porthleven on the Sithney road. Indeed, until 1846, Porthleven itself was part of the Parish of Sithney. When Porthleven was formed into a parish in its own right in 1846, it took land from both.
During the Middle Ages, Porthleven was fairly unimportant, as there was no harbour and the River Cober was passable all the way inland to Helston, though today the Cober is little more than a shallow stream in most places
It is highly unusual to find a Cornish Harbour which
faces south-west, as the prevailing winds blow straight inland, and as such,
Porthleven’s development as a port was always severely hampered. That is
probably why it never became a major trading port but remained a fishing and
boat building port, industries which still continue today.
It was only because Porthleven offered the only refuge for boats and ships in distress from the storms that regularly lash its shores along this windy coastline, that it ever grew to become its own parish. Otherwise, it is likely it would have remained a very small fishing inlet.
The harbour itself was constructed in 1825, and as explained above, that was extremely problematical, to say the least, to achieve. Even though a large fishing fleet for Mackerel & Pilchards soon started fishing off the coast, Porthelven remained a dangerous and difficult harbour to access. The port was taken over in the 1850’s by Harvey & Co, a Hayle based firm, and they made major improvements to the harbour, leaving the massive sea walls that we can see today.
Porthleven grew a great boat-building and fishing industry, but has never been able to overcome its main problem of facing south-west - you only have to watch the sea as a gale sets in to see why.
The Online Parish Clerk for Porthleven is Damien Willey, who may be reached via Email.
Please visit my
website
which has transcriptions of parish records, as well as many other
relevant items. For further information, please contact me at the
above address.
Damien
Information can be found at COCP - the Cornwall Online Census Project - which is regularly updated and has been verified, FreeCen at Rootsweb, which has a very good search engine and information from COCP, as well as GenUKI, which has more reference information and alternate resources.
For Parish Register information, please see GenUKI (link below) and the LDS website (library section).
For information, see GenUKI. Link below.
For more information regarding history, population, etc., visit GenUKI.
For a Parish Locator map, please click here. Porthleven can be located at coordinates D - 2.
For further map information, please visit GenUKI (Genealogy - United Kingdom & Ireland).
To see a current, zoomable Ordnance Survey map, please visit MultiMap, or for maps and satellite images use Google Maps.
