Crow's Nest
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A welcoming old pub, with great charm, food, and beer! It has a wonderful large open fire-place with all the trimmings (especially warm and welcoming after a bracing walk!), and the pub used to be the old mining count house for the South Caradon Mine, where the miners were paid in company tokens. By paying the mine workers in tokens, it meant that it was a way of ensuring that they always spent their money by paying it straight back into the company shop, thus increasing still further the profits of the mine owners. The Crow's Nest Inn also has four ghosts, all with their own stories to tell, and there is a clock in the bar above the open fire-place that is perpetually 10 minutes fast - if you put it right in the evening, then by morning it will again be 10 minutes fast, and it will continue to maintain the same 10 minutes fast from thereon in - never more!

Crow's Nest Inn

The pub also has a two-sided sign, not unusual, but on one side is a picture of a "crow's nest" up the mast of a ship that was traditionally used as a lookout position, and on the other side of the sign there is, well, a picture of a crow's nest, or rather a picture of a crow, that is in fact, in its nest!

The village itself is also called Crow's Nest, a curious name for a village, that apparently may mean "high fort", but there was such no fort on Caradon Hill behind the village, and the nearest would be the ancient Neolithic settlement of Stowe's Pound on Stowe's Hill. The village expanded greatly, along with nearby Darite and other villages and hamlets in the area, during the nineteenth century mining boom, and before then, Crow's Nest was presumably a much smaller hamlet. 'Crows' may also derive from the Cornish word 'krows', meaning 'cross', from an old cross that would once have been sited nearby the original settlement, but that is pure conjecture. The 'nest' part however, is not explained by this, unless it means the 'nest' or stone block, in which a wooden cross may have been supported. Alternatively, the name may  be more related to Old English and Anglo Saxon origins, with the village being located towards the eastern end of Cornwall, with corruptions and Anglicizing along the way - which would include the word 'nest'.