the boswells proved to be assiduous in their estate husbandry, and by the early 1700s a viable village community and a thriving estate had begun to emerge from the surrounding barren moorland. the new statistical account of 1837 documents early mining and quarrying in the area which was to become the impetus for the region to boom. by 1881 the parish population had blossomed and was 6,681, four times what it had been in 1831