Short take: sightseeing and reflections on past and present.
Carwinion House, our accommodation Tuesday and Wednesday nights, is a moderately sized stately home that has been in the same family for over two hundred years... a period which will end in a few months time. Our quintessentially upper-class English host, Jane Rogers, told us just before dinner (but a full two hours after we arrived, during which time there was no sign of anything amiss) that her husband had died two days earlier and that due to poor decision making by her husband's cousin (his predecessor as lord of the manor), or possibly malfeasance by the cousin's lawyer during the cousin's dotage (it wasn't entirely clear which), the house would soon be taken over by the National Trust, she would be moving out, and therefore she apologized in advance for if things seemed a little chaotic. Then she served us dinner.
Aside from a breathtaking experience of a truly stiff upper lip, the information cast an end of an era light over our stay. Two hundred years is a long time. When the Rogers family built the house there were no hospitals in Cornwall, nor were children required to go to school (both came only in the early years of the 20thC), mining and fishing were still the primary economic activities in the county, and life was Hobbsian (average life expectancy of miners was 34 years).
I know some of these details from our guide at the Poldark tin mine, which Claudia, Eric, Lidia and I visited Weds morning. The mine was worked for some 60 years during the 18th Century and is one of a huge number that riddle Cornwall (there were over 350 different mines in the area around Poldark alone, and it is only one of several major concentrations in the county).
Tin has been mined in Cornwall since the Bronze Age (bronze being made of copper and tin), and in fact Cornwall is one of only a couple of sources for the metal in Europe. But it was incredibly difficult and dangerous to dig out, and a visit to the Poldark mine is an eye-opening experience.
Tin is found in granite... a very hard rock... so the miners cut out no more than they had to while following the thin and twisty seams of cassiterite tin ore, or making drainage tunnels, shafts, or cross-cuts to get to new lodes. As a result they were often crawling long distances, chipping away at the rock, and then moving the ore, on their hands and knees, their surroundings lit by a single candle mounted on the brim of their hat. Water dripped and flowed everywhere, shifts were 12 hours long, or longer, and the miners lived in state of semi-serfdom, often having to buy most of their supplies (including the candles) from a company store owned by the mine owner. Boys went down into the mines at age 9, while the girls worked from the same age on the surface breaking the ore down with hammers into smaller chunks that the water-powered stamps could crush.
Walking, hunched over, through the (significantly enlarged in modern times to enable visits) tunnels of the Poldark mine on the hour-long tour was a sobering experience. Not for the first time I was reminded of how fortunate we are to live here and now.
After coming back from the mine, I walked through Carwinion's wild gardens with Lidia, several hectares with huge ancient trees, a riot of bluebells and other wild flowers, rhododendrons that were not tree-like, but actual trees, gunnera (also known as giant rhubarb, that can grow to 5 meters in height with individual leaves up to 2 meters in diameter), and over 200 species of bamboo (one of the most important collections in England). Then a few games with Franz, an excellent dinner in the superb 500-year old village pub, and (as always these days spent much of the time in the fresh air) off to an early bed.
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