Whatever else it may have missed out on down the centuries, there’s been no shortage of ambitious schemes for the port of Falmouth and its surrounding waters, writes Mike Truscott.

I touched last year on what might have been by way of a major docks development over at St Just-in-Roseland.

Now, courtesy of a fresh browse through “The Upper Fal In Old Photographs,” by the late Peter Gilson, I have been able to put some more flesh on those old bones – and definitely to place them in my what-if collection.

Ever since the present Falmouth Docks began to take shape after 1860, Peter noted, some experts had insisted they had been built in the wrong place.

It was argued that much of the costly dredging (sound familiar?) necessary to accommodate increasingly large ships could have been avoided by building instead between Turnaware and St Just Creek.

In 1910 the idea was advanced by the St Just and Falmouth Ocean Wharves and Railway Company, no less, but the First World War scuppered that one.

In 1919 it was revised as the St Just Docks Scheme. This one envisaged transatlantic liners landing passengers to travel to London by rail – on a newly-built line to St Austell! In 1923, though, the Penryn Advertiser described this as “recently abandoned.” In 1939, Silley Cox & Co, then owners of Falmouth Docks, bought Messack Farm and promoted a Parliamentary Bill to develop that stretch of shoreline. After the Second World War, the Falmouth Consolidation Bill of 1958-59 referred to the proposed docks complex as “Messackside.”

Alas, with the worsening depression in world shipping after the 1960s, the entire scheme was forgotten – to leave, as Peter wrote, “this magnificent estuary unsullied by unsightly industrial development.”