Dinner last night was a bit hit or miss -- apparently one of their chefs called in sick and the other(s) weren't able to keep either quality or timeliness in his/her absence. The rooms, however, and the ambience in the pub, were excellent. And the cove and bay were great, so I'll give Driftwood Spars a B+.
The visit to the tin mine and St. Agnes this morning was not as attractive to the troops as expected: the only one to partake was yours truly. Their loss: St. Agnes was nice enough, but the tin mine was fascinating.
I think that the Blue Hills Tin Mine is the only one still operating in Cornwall. They don't produce much (around 10 tons / year, I believe), but together with entrance fees and tin jewelry sales it is apparently enough to support the family running it. They use a mixture of medieval and modern technology, although modern is a relative term: there are no computers, or anything, in fact, which couldn't have been built 80 years ago. And they do everything with around 3.5KW of electricity... which seems a surprisingly small amount.
The most interesting machines, IMHO, were the beam engine and the various separators.
The beam engine first: this is powered by a water wheel and alternately lifts and then drops a set of heavy iron rods (the beams, I assume) on to fist-sized chunks of ore to reduce it to the consistency of fine sand. Water flows continuously through the crushing area, carrying away sufficiently crushed ore. So simple, so effective.
The crushed ore and water then flows to a series of separators, the simplest of which is just a helical ramp down which the ore suspension flows: the heaviest grains (tin and other metals, called the heads) stay close to the axis, and the lightest (waste, or tailings) are washed out to the edges. The intermediate grains (the mids) are sent to another machine (basically a tumbler with hard pebbles in it) to be further reduced in size before being run through the helix again. Brilliant!
No chemicals are used in the separation process, and the ore in the valley is so free of toxic substances that trout live in the tailing pond!
There were many other interesting aspects of the mine, the smelting process, and the history of mining in Cornwall, but I suspect I might have exhausted the interest of most readers of this blog by now, so you'll either have to ask me the next time we see one another, or, better, go to the Blue Hills Tin Mine and see for yourself.
In the afternoon we walked along the coast -- as lovely as ever -- for 3-4 hours to Portreath, a rather uninspiring little town. Our accommodation here, The Portreath Arms, makes a similar impression... whereby the food was better than the rooms, and the service was excellent.
