growann.
/ˈɡrəʊən/ Cornish dialect.attributive.1768 Cookworthy Patent in S. Smiles J. Wedgwood (1894) xv. 177 A kind of porcelain composed of moor-stone or growan and growan clay.1824 F. Hitchins & S. Drew Hist. Cornwall I. xiii. §4. 564 The black growan soil consists of a thin stratum of light black earth..the detritus of the granite or growan.1894 S. Smiles J. Wedgwood xv. 169 The Porcelain or Growan Clay was suitable for many purposes for which the Staffordshire Clays were unsuitable.
A soft decomposed granite, overlying the veins of tin in Cornwall. hard growan n. granite or moorstone.
ΚΠ
1753 Chambers's Cycl. Suppl. Growan, a word used by the miners in Cornwall to express a sort of coarse and gritty stone, which they are usually obliged to dig through before they come at the veins of ore.
1778 W. Pryce Mineralogia Cornubiensis 73 Soft Grouan..can scarcely be called a Stone; for it is rather a sandy or priany Stratum of Moorstone gravel... It generally lies at the extremities of the Moorstone Stratum, or hard Grouan.
1855 Cornwall (1862) 75 A decomposition of the rock [granite], more particularly of the felspar in it, which gradually pulverizes it to a ‘soft growan’.
This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1900; most recently modified version published online December 2020).
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n.1753