Above the summer-blue sea, mine stacks, ruined engine houses, and the 1980s head-frame above Allen Shaft punctuate the landscape. From Botallack’s restored count house (the accounts office), which provides refreshments and a repeating video about the Poldark TV series (this is the site of the “Wheal Leisure” family mine), a volunteer from the Trevithick Society conducts us around the abandoned ground, exploited on and off over centuries for its shiny stones – tin and copper, and later arsenic.
Grylls Bunny – an overgrown quarry partly masked with later mining spoil – was an early opencast working for tin, and small pits extend down the cliff. By the early 19th century, shafts had been sunk and levels driven out beneath the ocean; the greater depths of working necessitated steam power to supersede horses and water wheels, to work the pumps, winding machines and stamps (crushers). Two engine houses, built of dressed granite blocks, are perched on the Crowns rocks, just above sea level.
Hard-earned ore (mostly copper), picked from narrow stopes many fathoms underground, was hauled up the Boscawen diagonal shaft in a box on wheels; this also carried miners up and down, as well as early tourists, who paid for the privilege. Men coming up the shafts could sometimes be heard singing in harmony by offshore sailors.
Exposed clifftop terraces, now stained red and barren of vegetation apart from clumps of withered thrift and ling, were the workplace for women (“bal maidens”) and children; armed with big and little hammers, they sorted ores and broke the copper into pea-sized fragments for shipment to smelters in south Wales.
Today this once industrious land is deserted apart from a few curious visitors. Hogweed, dry grasses and purple knapweed overgrow little fields edged in wizened blackberries; jackdaws harry a kestrel swooping above expanses of bracken, but the choughs, reputed to hang around butts on a nearby headland, are out of sight.
Back at St Just, in the 19th-century miners’ chapel, the appeal for funds to refurbish this Grade II*-listed Wesleyan place of worship points out that it would have been the last familiar building seen by miners departing for emigration overseas.
