GEOLOGY, BY DR. BOASE. Near Tregony Bridge, a fine-grained, glossy, and very fissile blue slate is exposed in a quarry, which appears to be the prevailing rock of this small parish. This slate probably contains beds of massive lamellar rocks, as the same kind of slate does in the adjoining parishes, but they are not in this particular district visible on the surface. All these rocks belong to the calcareous series. CRANTOCK. HALS. Is situate in the hundred of Pedyr, and hath upon the north the Irish sea; on the west, St. Cuthbert; south, Newland; east, St. Columb Minor. As for this compound name, it is plain British; Cran-tock, Cran-dock, id est, a place that heretofore bore or carried beech trees. But others will have the name to be derived from its pretended titular guardian, one St. Carantochus, a British disciple of St. Colomb’s, of whom I must plead _non sum informatus_; otherwise than that Carantodhius in old British, Scots, and Irish, is love, affection, tenderness. Cran-teck is fair beech trees. More sure I am that this district, at the time of the Domesday Roll, was taxed under the name of Ryalton or Cargoll; and in the Inquisition of the Bishops of Lincoln and Winchester, 1294, into the value of church livings in Cornwall, Ecclesia Sancti Carentini in Decanatu de Pidre is thus rated, the vicar 40_s._ and the nine prebends, then extant in this collegiate church, were thus taxed, viz. John de Woolrington, 53_s._ 4_d._; John de Cattelyn, 30_s._; Nicholas Strange, 30_s._; John de Ingham, 40_s._; Ralph de Trethinick, 53_s._ 4_d._; David de Monton, 40_s._; William de Patefond, 40_s._; John Lovell, 30_s._; John de Glasney, 6_s._ 8_d._; in all 19_l._ 3_s._ 4_d._ From whence I gather this collegiate church had great revenues then belonging to it, since it is higher rated to the Pope’s annats than any other church then in Cornwall. However, before Richard II.’s time it was wholly impropriated or appropriated to its founder and endower, the Prior of St. Pedyr at Bodmin; the vicar subsisting only by a small salary of 6_l._ and oblations and obventions; for which reason it is not mentioned in Wolsey’s inquisition, or Valor Beneficiorum. Which collegiate church being dissolved by the statute 26 Henry VIII. and the revenues vested in the crown, the impropriator Mr. Buller is patron and rector of the vicarage church now extant; the incumbent Warne, who comparatively subsists upon his bounty; and the parish rated to the 4_s._ per pound Land Tax, 1696, 73_l._ 16_s._ By reason of the great quantities of sea-sand blown up from the Gannell creek by the wind (tempore Edward VI. as Holinshed saith), the place where the college stood is now scarce discernible; only a consecrated arched well of water bears the name of St. Ambrose’s Well, contiguous therewith.