Mines in Pendeen

A day of mine visits, first to Greevor Tin Mine (not so old) and then Levant copper mine (old). You learn a lot about how the ores were extracted and the processes of refining and all that technical stuff, and it is all impressive, but some of the more day-to-day aspects grabbed my attention. Por ejemplo, boys as young as seven worked underground, life expectancy was about 27 years, women and girls performed some hard physical labour, such as breaking up the rocks with hammers, and horses were used in the mines.

To get horses into the mines, someone tied their legs, those of the horses, that is, up against their bodies and lowered them on platforms, deep into the mines, where they, the horses, LIVED for several years. There was a vet who took care of them, especially notable because there was no doctor for the miners. When the horses were brought up to the surface again, their eyes had to be covered for a time so that they could get used to the light. (How covering their eyes got them used to the light, je ne sais pas.)

The Levant mine ran under the sea. Its deepest and longest tunnels had very little air way out there under the ocean, as you can imagine, and it was very hot. All mining conditions are terrible, but this seemed unusually horrible.

How did the miners get up and down, you may wonder. Ladders. It took two hours for a miner to climb from the bottom to the top—maybe just as long to go the other way, I don't know—so a kind of escalator was developed. This was a platform that was lowered (and raised) at twelve foot increments. A miner would have to hop off one platform and catch the next one as a miner, going in the opposite direction did the same. This worked pretty well until the mechanism broke and something like 39 miners were killed. After this, they went back to the ladders.

When the mines were prosperous, investors sometimes made 1000 times their investment. Isn't it always that way! Maybe not exactly THAT way!

Arsenic is a by product of tin (not sure about copper), so the men who worked extracting and/or purifying that metal wore protective clothing, like hazmat suits, and put clay on their faces. Inter alia, a brilliant green pigment made using arsenic was important in wall paper design, and people had to have their wall paper despite all.

Tin cans were developed around 1810. They were so thick and heavy at first that they were opened by being whacked by a hammer. The invention of the can opener came later.

As one walks the path in this area, one sees many ruins. Here is part of one:





And here is the whole thing!




I was pretty mined out after four hours, and actually skipped out of the lecture on steam engines because It was clear that it was going to go on forever and my head was about to explode from information. Besides, I had places to go in the rain, in my boots that leak with my phone that, I discovered, is really not working at all...no wi-fi, nada.

By and by I encountered a bovine of the male gender. Excuse me, Mr. young bull, I am coming through and I hope that my orange rain jacket will not make me say Olé as we pass each other:





One of his friends. Bulls are nowhere near as good looking as cows, and that is all there is to it:



More quadrupeds! He's eyeing my walking poles, he is:



A sweet stone bridge with fancy rails



Here it is in the distance and in the mist, Cape Cornwall:



which everyone is now calling the New Land's End because everyone seems to hate Land's End due to its having become a commercial sprawl. Tomorrow I will find out for myself.

Hydrangeas:


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