First, a couple of errata:
o the pub yesterday, the Tinner's Arms, was in fact 13th Century, and was built to provide accommodation for the masons who built the next door church of St. Sennara (which we looked around after lunch, and which was charming).
o the water-powered ore crushing device at the Blue Hills tin mine near St. Agnes that I referred to as a beam engine is nothing of the sort. I'm not sure what its proper name is, but it isn't a beam engine.
Dinner at the Gurnard's Head Inn was excellent, as were the rooms and breakfast, and we set off this morning in good spirits. Such good spirits indeed that we immediately took a side trip down the Gurnard's Head itself -- a promontory that from the side looks like the head of a Gurnard, a type of fish. We, all except for Rochelle, who has a touch of vertigo, went along the Striding Edge-like spine and then did some impromptu rock climbing onto the top of headland some 60 meters or so above the sea... whereupon it promptly started to rain. So we put on our raingear and walked back to the main coast path... and by the time we got there the rain had stopped and the sun was shining again. Clearly the Gurnard prefers to be left alone!
We got to Treen and the Geevor mine around 1:30PM. It's an interesting area, this extreme end of Cornwall -- much less well kept and twee than most of the coastal areas we have been walking through. There are mine workings all over the place and it has a distinctly blue-collar feel to it. I don't think that it has ever quite recovered from the end of mining -- no other economic activity appears to have sprung up to provide a new basis for the local economy. There are no large beaches to attract tourists or the builders of second homes. The land is granite, which weathers to an unattractive dark grit, and there are few trees. All in all, and especially in the rain, it feels a little like Newcastle, the depressed post-coal mining, post-ship building, town where I grew up.
The mine was fascinating. They have a room-sizede three-dimensional model of the shafts and tunnels and stopes that were mined in the immediate surrounds of Treen... stunning. There must have been two hundred shafts, with a myriad of underground levels and tunnels, up to 600 meters deep and stretching over 1.5 kilometers out under the sea. All of this dug through granite, following seams of tin that in this area were rarely more than 1 meter in width. And the model is almost certainly incomplete -- there has been underground mining going on in the area for a thousand years or more, and when a mine was closed because of depth or water or inadequate quality or quantity of ore, it was more often than not forgotten.
A good example of this was the mine we went into and spent a half an hour underground in -- the Wheal Mexico. It was dug out around 300 years ago, closed, forgotten, and then rediscovered by chance in the late 20th Century shortly before the Geevor mine closed. There must be thousands more like it.
It is sobering to think of the conditions under which those early miners labored. Working with hand tools, in the hard granite of this part of Cornwall they could drive a tunnel (sized to their own bodies -- which makes them pretty narrow and low for someone like me) less than a foot a day, their working area lit only by a tallow candle or two. At least they were largely spared the problems of explosive gases and cave-ins that plague coal-mines, but it was tough work and the life expectancy of a miner was around 45 years up until the beginning of the 20th Century.
One last interesting statistic: after the collapse of the tin and copper prices due to the development of alluvial (i.e., cheap to mine) deposits elsewhere in the world in the mid 1800's, 20% of the male population of Cornwall emigrated each decade for four decades in a row... a higher rate of exodus than Ireland. I think that level of emigration marks an area and a people for a long, long time.
Well, enough of mining. The sounds of boule outside -- yes, there is a boule court here for some reason, and Russell and Sally despite wind and intermittent rain have managed to convince Thomas and Marcus and Gabi to play with them for the last couple of hours -- have faded, so dinner must be imminent. And while I'm not expecting a gourmet meal like last night, the pub apparently prides itself on its curries... Cornish cuisine at its best ;-).
