Tinners
Four of us were gathered together this week (celebrating St David’s Day), and one of us asked what Cornwall meant to each of us.
Here are the responses:
Tintagel Castle, The Eden Project and St Mawes
China clay moonscapes and clotted cream
Cliffs and wild coasts, holiday homes and Posy Simmonds cartoons
Arsenic
Arsenic: how very perceptive.
As our collective list shows, Cornwall is good on memorable and iconic landscapes. Go to the home page of the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and you will see a moody and romantic image of a tin mine engine house and stack, perched on the edge of a rugged coastal cliffs (https://www.cornwall-aonb.gov.uk/). These structures are symbolic of ‘an extended period of industrial expansion and prolific innovation’ (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1215/) which contributed enormously, not only to the landscape of Cornwall, but also to the industrial revolution, the British economy, to mining around the world and, of course, climate change.
The long term impact of mining and industrialisation on the planet was probably impossible to imagine during the heady years of technological development, sizeable profit margins and world-wide influence. But there were other issues, however, which could and should have been recognised at the time. Arsenic was just one of these.
Let’s go back to the beginning. Mining has a very long history in Cornwall, probably starting in the Bronze Age. Medieval mining of tin was so significant in the south west that separate Stannary Courts and Parliaments were set up in Devon and Cornwall in the early 14th century. The UNESCO world heritage site ‘Cornish and West Devon Mining Landscape’ (granted in 2006) focuses on the period from 1700 to 1914, and specifically mentions the significance of the ‘remains of mines, engines houses, smallholdings, ports, harbours, canals, railways, tramroads, and industries allied to mining, along with new towns and villages’. Of such fragments are romantic landscapes created.
Terroir’s induction into Cornish Tin Mining was provided by the Geevor Tin Mine (https://geevor.com/), on the north Cornish coast, near the villages of Pendeen and Boscaswell. It is part of the St Just Mining Area and the site is now run by Pendeen Community Heritage. Ironically, Geevor is a ‘modern’ mine established around 1906 and expanded significantly after World War I. The mine closed in 1990 and the pumps, which drained the mine, were switched off in 1991. Despite its modernity by UNESCO standards, the mine describes itself as the ‘Key Centre within the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site’. But, of course, if there were plenty of earlier mines remaining, with which to interpret Cornwall’s mining history, there might be no need for a World Heritage Site.
It took us two mornings to get our heads around the vocabulary of developers, stopers and samplers; of cross cuts, lodes, drives, pillars and box holes; of wagons, locomotives, rocker shovels, skips and, of course the grizzly. We learnt to interpret the photographs of young men, stripped to the waste, undertaking gruelling, skilled, manual labour in hot, deep, cramped, under-sea, mining levels. We began to understand the efficiencies brought by Trevithick’s steam technology (in, for instance, economics of production, and in underground safety through water pumping, ventilation and personnel transport) and the increased impact of steam-driven mining on Cornwall and around the world. We got a handle on the complexities of processing the ore to a marketable product which could be sold on to manufacturers. And we began to understand the cost in human life in winning, processing and supporting the entire industry.
Below:
Upper and middle row - a historical range of mining technology
Lower row - views of the Geevor Mine processing area
Below left: a model of the 20th century shaft and winding gear as it once was, and will be again. Below right: the winding gear currently under repair.
Despite this growing understanding of mining issues, the landscape around Geevor Mine seemed surprisingly innocent.
But, as a guide explained to us, the expanses of waste gravels and green fields below us would once have been occupied by extraction paraphenalia and a shanty town housing miners and all the ancillary workers who serviced the pre 20th century mines – candle makers, charcoal-burners, carpenters, smiths, smelters, carters, chandlers, shop keepers, ale-house keepers, and so on. Even in the 20th century (below right), it would have been a busy area.
The stonehenge style kit on the left, by the way, is the remains of the stamps, the steam-powered ore crushers which would have thudded relentlessy, 24 hours a day.
All the rest is gone now, leaving just these romantic ruins…
But how wonderful to be working in an industry which leaves no massive scars, no starkly white China clay pyramids, no coal heaps, no shale bings, no slag heaps. All the ‘arisings’ from tin mining can be sold on as aggregate for construction, can they not? Well, maybe only after technological developments made it worth reprocessing the waste rock heaps for the tin they still contained, while chucking the unsaleable rubbish into the sea.
And we are not just talking tin here. Tin and iron come up as an oxide, accompanied by sulphide minerals such as copper, zinc, lead, bismuth, antimony and, yes, the mineral beloved of murder mysteries, arsenic.
Arsenic became a saleable bi-product of tin mining and, in the 19th century, was processed by burning in a calciner which trapped the arsenic as soot. Children were often employed to scrape it out of the chamber and chimney. Our guide explained that despite wearing an early forerunner of PPE, most of these children never lived beyond their teens. Miners’ life expectancy was also short – perhaps into their twenties and thirties. It seems likely that, in these polluted and impoverished living conditions, a woman’s life expectancy was also limited. As so often, our romantic landscapes are built on the problems of the past.
And you still want to know what a grizzly is? It’s a set of parallel steel bars used to sieve out the large chunks of ore. Gravity sent the small stuff through the bars into the skip loading boxes below. The grizzly man had to break up the larger stuff with a hammer.