The Count House at Botallack was built during the 1860s when the dressing floors were expanded on the cliff top, replacing a previous Count House on the track leading down to the engine houses on the headland. As the name suggests, it was where the miners collected their pay but it was also the hub of the day-to-day running of the mine. It was restored by the National Trust and is now open to the public with a café and an information centre about the history and wildlife of the area (no entry fee). The building is now heated geothermally, by bore holes in the ground below it to heat water using the same hot rocks that made the mines unpleasantly hot to work in.
The engine house ahead with the spoil heaps housed the pumping engine for West Wheal Owles.
In 1783, the mine was known as Crackegodna. In the 19th Century, this was taken over as part of the Wheal Owles complex and renamed West Wheal Owles although the old name still survives as Cargodna shaft. The surviving engine house was for the pumping engine. The corner of a wall is all that remains of the winding engine house which was used to power a double track tramway leading down to a shaft on the cliffs.
The West Wheal Owles pumping engine house was used for filming both Wheal Grace and Wheal Leisure in the BBC's Poldark series. There was a real mine called Wheal Leisure at Perranporth where Winston Graham lived.
The Cornish name for Botallack Head is Lae Maen Veor, meaning great stone ledge. The two engine houses perched on the ledges were part of Crown mines, named after The Crowns rocks off the headland. The mine was built in 1815 and the workings extend for a quarter of a mile under the Atlantic ocean; the deepest shaft is 250 fathoms below sea level. In 1863 the chain which pulled the mine gig suddenly broke, causing eight men and a boy to plummet to their deaths down the shaft. The mine finally closed at the outbreak of the First World War.
The tall chimney to your right was part of an arsenic labyrinth. A path leads up to it via the building with the arched brick doorway. Once you have finished exploring, return to the path alongside the dressing floors and continue until it forks.
The granules of ore were heated in a furnace to remove impurities such as sulphur and particularly arsenic. By heating the ore in air, the arsenic impurities could be driven off as a vapour. As the impurities escaped as gasses, the particles of ore melted into grey crystalline lumps of tin oxide known as "black tin".
The exhaust gasses were cooled and condensed to form a white powder deposited in the flues or purpose-built condensers. The white powder - arsenic - was collected and sold. A few grains of pure arsenic are enough to be fatal but the majority of arsenic workers managed to protect themselves by stuffing cotton wool up their noses and painting their faces and any other exposed areas of skin white with fuller's earth to prevent arsenic being absorbed through the pores of their skin.
Arsenic is a chemical element that is part-way between a metal and non-metal, known as a metalloid. In the natural environment it reacts with oxygen to form an oxide which readily dissolves in water to form arsenic acid. This is able to leech into groundwater and cause contamination. Deeper in the ground where sulphur is more available than oxygen, arsenic is found as sulphide compounds.
The conical structures in the old dressing floors are the remains of devices known as "buddles". These were used to separate the ore from the rock (known as gange) in the ore slurry created by the stamping mill. The slurry was trickled onto the centre of the dome and a rotating set of brushes, suspended from wooden spokes, smeared the slurry around the circular structure. The heavy ore fragments would deposit near the central dome whereas unwanted rock fragments would travel further and end up in a pit around the outside.
Peregrine falcons nest on the cliffs here so you may see one flying overhead or perched on a rocky outcrop as you walk along the coast to Levant.
The peregrine falcon can reach over 322 km/h (200 mph) during its hunting stoop (high speed dive) making it the fastest member of the animal kingdom. In 2005, a peregrine was measured at a top speed of 389 km/h (242 mph). The air pressure at this speed could damage a bird's lungs. However small bony tubercles on a falcon's nostrils guide the powerful airflow away, enabling the bird to breathe more easily while diving. In Cornish dialect, these falcons are known as "winnards" and local expressions include "shrammed as a winnard" (meaning chilled) and "rumped up like a winnard" (meaning huddled).
Choughs nest in the area and are fairly regularly seen.
After several decades of extinction, a pair of choughs settled in 2001 on the Lizard Peninsula. Since then, the birds have successfully bred and been joined by a few more incoming birds, and the population has steadily grown and spread further across Cornwall. Each Cornish chough is fitted with one leg ring in the colours of St Piran's flag and two other colours on the opposite leg to identify them.
Heather can grow in soils which have concentrations of metals normally considered toxic to other plants and they are also tolerant of salty (high sodium) environments on the coast. Their symbiosis with fungi restricts metal uptake through their roots.
The temperature of the rocks increases by 1 degree roughly for each 15 fathoms that a mine is sunk so mines were unpleasantly hot places to work. The deepest mine in Cornwall was Dulcoath where air temperatures of 43°C were recorded at the 550 fathom level.
Extra shafts were sunk into many mines to improve the ventilation and bring down the temperature. You can see these on OS maps marked as "Air Shaft". Under the sea, shafts to ventilate and cool the mines were not an option so most submarine mines were particularly uncomfortable with temperatures of 32-38°C being common.
The gully is part of the inlet known as Whealcock Zawn.
According to "The Z to Z of Great Britain", there are just over 40 place names in Britain that begin with the letter Z; over three-quarters of them are in Cornwall. One of the main reasons for this is that the Cornish word for "coastal inlet" is zawn, and coastline is something that Cornwall has rather a lot of.
Zawn Brinny, near Levant mine is an example of one of these.
Cornwall has the longest stretch of coastline of any county in the UK, stretching for roughly 400 miles around 80% of the county, and there are over 300 beaches. Wherever you are in Cornwall, you are never more than 16 miles from the sea, and from the majority of hills you can see it on a clear day.
Continue ahead to the corner of the wall.
At this point you can optionally visit Levant Mine and return here.
Otherwise, turn right onto the track along the wall. Follow the track along the wall to reach a fork in the track.
As early as the 18th Century, mine workings in the Levant area tunnelled below sea level and went beneath the sea. In 1820 the operation known as Levant Mine was established and operated continuously for over 100 years until 1930, after which it was abandoned and slowly flooded. It got the nickname of "mine under the sea" because its network of tunnels over 60 miles long extends under the Atlantic Ocean, stretching 1.5 miles out from the coast. Within the tunnels, a blind miner helped others to navigate when their candles failed.
The beam engine is still in situ and was restored after 60 years of decay by a group of enthusiasts known as the "Greasy Gang". The working engine can be seen within a mining museum run by the National Trust.
Some of the Cornish mines were up to half a mile in depth and every day men needed to get from the surface to the bottom of the mine and back after doing a day of physically exhausting work. Having men climb a half-mile long ladder was not efficient for mine operators, so faster and less exhausting means to move men about were invented. Winding apparatus could be used to lower and raise men in a basket, and mechanisms along these lines were still in use in the granite quarries of Bodmin Moor during the 20th Century.
However, the beam engine offered an alternative approach: the long rod of a pumping engine could have steps on which men could ride down, usually 12 feet, during one beam engine stroke and the sides of the shaft could have ledges, so the men could step off onto a ledge whilst the engine reversed direction, then step back on for the next stroke. Some of the larger mines had dedicated "man engines" which were tailored for this purpose.
The man engine was first invented in Germany in 1833. The Cornwall Polytechnic Society immediately realised its potential benefit to miners' well-being and sponsored a trial which took place in Tresavean mine at Lanner. Initially this was a small scale installation powered by a water wheel. It was then replaced by a full-scale model, more than ten times longer and powered by a steam engine. Although successful, the cost of building a dedicated man engine put off many mine owners who were much more interested in profit than the welfare of the workforce. It was not until the productivity improvements (resulting from miners not spending 3 hours climbing ladders) were costed-in that some other mines deployed them.
The process of placing trig points on top of prominent hills and mountains began in 1935 to assist in the retriangulation of Great Britain - a project to improve the accuracy of maps which took three decades.
A plate (known as a "flush bracket" and marked with an ID code) on the side of each trig point marked a known measured height above sea level. The brass plate on the top with three arms and central depression (known as a "spider") was used to mount a theodolite which was used to measure the angles between neighbouring trig points very accurately. These angles allowed the construction of a system of triangles which covered the entire country and provided a measurement system accurate to around 20 metres.
In America, during the 1870s, Colorado beetle was devastating cash crops including cotton, tobacco and staples such as potato. At the time, the most popular pesticides were arsenic compounds so this led to a sudden increase in demand for arsenic. Since this was soon after the collapse in copper prices, this delayed the closure of many mines and during this period, over half of the world’s supply of arsenic was produced from mines in Cornwall and Devon.
The pyramidal cages and coarse grilles covering mineshafts allow bats to be able to roost in the shafts. Shafts which are fenced and completely open are one of the favourite nesting places of the Cornish chough. Therefore resist the temptation to drop stones down the shafts otherwise you may unknowingly be stoning bats or chough chicks to death.
Gorse is a legume, related to peas and like other members of the pea family it's able to get its nitrogen from the air. It's also tolerant to heavy metals in the soil and to salt. This makes it able to grow in Cornwall's harshest environments: moorland, coast and mine waste tips.
Like other members of the pea family, gorse produces its seeds in pods. The seeds are ejected with a popping sound when pods split open in hot weather. This can catapult the seeds up to five metres. The plants are able to live 30 years and survive sub-zero temperatures, the seeds can withstand fire and remain viable in the soil for 30 years.
Gorse seeds each contain a small body of ant food. The seeds also release a chemical which attracts ants from some distance away. The ants carry the seeds to their nests, eat the ant food and then discard the seeds, helping them to disperse.
The seeds of common gorse are the source of the chemical used to identify people with the rare "hh" blood group. The red blood cells in the vast majority of people (in blood groups A, B, AB and O) have a material called "H substance" on their surface. It turns out that the chemical extracted from gorse binds remarkably specifically to this and cells from the "hh" blood group (that have no H substance) are left alone.
Gorse is also known (particularly in the Westcountry) as furze from the Middle English word furs. This itself is from the Old English word fyres, closely related to the Old English word for fire.
Before the Industrial Revolution, gorse was valued as a fuel for bread ovens and kilns as it burns rapidly, very hot and with little ash. It was in such demand that there were quite strict rules about how much gorse could be cut on common land.
In more recent times, due to reliance on fossil fuels, this is now out of balance and gorse has increased in rural areas which have been abandoned agriculturally.
As gorse ages, it accumulates more dead material. The spiky, springy nature of the plant even when dead means air can circulate well through the dead material and when this dries out in the summer, it substantially increases the risk of fires. As gorse seeds have evolved to withstand fire, controlled burning can be used to used to keep the gorse at a young age where uncontrolled fires are less likely.
Gorse is present as two species along the Atlantic coast and size is the easiest way to tell them apart: Common Gorse bushes are up to 10ft tall whereas Western Gorse is more of a mat - less than 1ft tall. Common Gorse flowers in spring whereas Western Gorse flowers in late summer - early autumn.
In 2005 a man had to be rescued from a 10ft deep patch of coastal gorse by helicopter. Whilst mountain biking home along the coast from a bar, with the assistance of a not insignificant amount of alcohol, he managed to catapult himself into the bushes where he remained stuck for 2 days before being found by a passer-by. She asked if he needed help, to which he replied "can you ring the RAF?".
Between the two species, some gorse is almost always in flower, hence the old country phrases: "when gorse is out of blossom, kissing's out of fashion" (which is recorded from the mid-19th century) and "when the furze is in bloom, my love's in tune" (which dates from the mid-18th century). Common gorse flowers are bright yellow. Western gorse flowers are very slightly more orange - more like the colour of the "yolk" in a Cadbury's creme egg. Also like creme eggs, gorse flowers are edible but are significantly better for use in salads and to make a tea, beer or wine.
Common gorse flowers have a coconut-like scent but rather than fresh coconut, it is reminiscent of desiccated coconut or the popular brand of surf wax, Mr Zoggs. However, not everyone experiences the smell in the same way: for some people it's very strong and for others it quite weak. One complicating factor is that Western Gorse flowers don't have any scent, so you need to be sniffing a tall gorse plant to test yourself.
Flower scents are volatile organic compounds which drift though the air and has evolved as an advertisement to pollinating insects that nectar is available. Squeezing the flowers releases these compounds onto the surface where they can evaporate and therefore intensifies the smell. Similarly the warming effect of sunlight helps the compounds to evaporate faster and so the smell is more intense on sunny days.
Gorse flower wine can be made using 5 litres of gorse flowers stripped from the stems and simmering these in 5 litres of boiling water. Once the flowers are removed, 1.3kg of sugar should be dissolved in the hot water and allowed to cool to room temperature. Then add 500g of chopped raisins and juice and zest of 2 lemons and ferment with white wine yeast and yeast nutrient. Although flowers are present year-round, they are best picked in spring (April and May) when they are most profuse and fragrant.
Many Cornish mines have names starting with Wheal, and it is a common misconception that Wheal meant "mine". In fact, Wheal simply meant "workplace". The word for "mine" was bal and the women who worked on the surface were known as Bal Maids.
Tin is a semi-rare metal well-known for its corrosion resistance which is used extensively in electronics, engineering alloys and anti-corrosion coatings. Unlike many other "heavy" metals, it is not poisonous which has resulted in its use within food packaging - the ubiquitous "tin can" - and increasingly as a replacement for lead, which was used extensively before its toxicity was understood.
Tin is found in Cornwall as the ore cassiterite (tin oxide) which occurs in small crystals amongst other rocks; even a "rich" tin ore only contains 5% tin. The name for the ore is thought either to come from the Greek kassiteros meaning "tin" or from the Phoenician name Cassiterid for Britain and Ireland.
When a bar of tin metal is bent, it emits an audible screaming/cracking sound, known as a "tin cry". This freaky behaviour arises due to a crystallisation phenomenon known as "twinning" that occurs frequently in tin, where two or more crystals grow out of each other, sharing a common section (the name arose from "Siamese twins"). The "crying" sound is caused by these joined crystals snapping apart.
Once rendered into a powder, the tin ore was separated from fragments of less useful rock, usually using water and taking advantage of the heavier tin ore sinking more quickly out of a suspension than the other minerals. The slurry was sometimes run slowly down an inclined wooden board: the heavier tin fragments would settle near the top and could be scraped off whereas the fragments of lighter rock could be discarded from the bottom, and the material in the middle could be recycled into the next batch. Conical structures (known as "buddles") with rotating brushes were also used. It's possible that the Cornish mining word for the waste sludge of rock fragments - gange - is the origin of the English slang word "gunge".
The final stage of tin production was a process known as smelting which produced the pure shiny metal which was known as "white tin". The smelting process used charcoal or coal as a source of carbon to chemically reduce the tin from the oxide to its elemental form, similar to the blast furnaces used for producing iron.
Particularly in the earlier years of mining, this was typically done in a specialised facility (known as a "blowing house") to which the concentrated tin oxide (known as "black tin") was transported from the mines. In Victorian times, reverberatory furnaces using powdered anthracite replaced the charcoal and forced-air furnaces powered by water wheels, and more smelting was done onsite at the mines.
Pasties became popular with miners initially as a meal that could easily be carried to work though some mines eventually had stoves so a batch of pasties could be lowered down raw and baked fresh at the bottom of the shaft. Mines were very wet places so keeping a pasty dry for several hours would have been a real challenge.
The popular story of pasties eaten in mines being held by their crimped crust which was then discarded is likely to be an urban myth. As well as the difficulty of holding a "man size" pasty by its crimp without it snapping off. You can try this experiment for yourself with a "large" (enormous) size Philps pasty (but not on a harbour wall). Miners were generally too poor and hungry to throw away food. Photos from the 1890s show miners with pasties wrapped in a cloth bag to keep them clean down a mine. Some researchers (very dedicated to the pasty cause) have checked through thousands of photos and found none where a miner is holding a pasty by its crimp.
The "National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty" was founded in 1895 when snappy names weren't in fashion. Their first coastal acquisition was Barras Nose at Tintagel in 1897. Five years later, Tintagel Old Post Office was their first house to be acquired in Cornwall. The National Trust now owns over 700 miles of British coastline.
The National Trust now has over 4 million members and is the largest voluntary conservation organisation in Europe. In the UK, the National Trust has more members than all the political parties combined and the only organisation currently larger at the time of writing is the AA.
National Trust cafés serve around 4.5 million cups of tea per year which is enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool.
The National Trust owns 250,000 hectares of land, of which 10% is currently woodland. The organisation has made a commitment to increase this to 17% by 2030 by planting 20 million trees.
The National Trust is the largest owner of farms in the UK. It has around 2,000 tenants and over 600,000 acres of land. It has been calculated that 43% of all the rainwater in England and Wales drains through National Trust land.
The National Trust maintains a network of around 15,000 miles of paths on their land, roughly a quarter of which are public rights of way and the remaining majority are permissive paths.
Vertical holes leading into a mine are known as shafts whereas horizontal tunnels are known as adits. Adits were created both as a way to get into the mine (a portal adit) and also to drain water out of the mine from the tunnels above the adit. Tunnels deeper than this needed some sort of pumping mechanism to raise water up to the drainage adit.
Mine shafts were dug for several reasons as well as another way of getting people into the mine. One was to pump water up from the lower levels of the mine using a waterwheel or steam engine. Another was to haul ore and waste out of the mine (known as "winding") which was done with capstans and horses in the days before steam engines. The shafts associated with pumping or winding steam engines were often called "engine shafts". Mine shafts were also dug for ventilation and these are often marked as "air shaft" on maps.
Since the bodies of ore in Cornwall lie in approximately vertical cracks (e.g. 70 degrees from horizontal) between other rocks, these seams of ore (known as "lodes") were followed using near-vertical cavities inside the mine known as "stopes". Arrangements of ladders and platforms were used to move up and down these spaces.
To get around inside a mine and also to search for new bodies of ore, internal horizontal tunnels known as "drives" were dug and the network of these arranged at a particular height formed a "level" in the mine.
Cornwall's iconic engine houses were built to house huge beam engines - a type of steam engine with a pivoting beam. This configuration was particularly suited to powering pumps to stop the quarry pits and mines from flooding as water trickled into them from above. Inside the engine house, steam from a boiler would push up a piston, causing the beam to tilt downwards, pushing the pump down into the shaft. The steam would then be shut off and cold water would be used to condense the steam within the piston back into water, creating a partial vacuum. Atmospheric pressure then pushed the piston back down into the vacuum, raising the beam and lifting water out of the shaft. The valves to apply the steam and cold water were mechanically automated, maintaining a steady rocking motion of the giant beam.
Most 19th Century mines had an office building for the accountant (purser) and the managerial staff. The purser was often one of the mine's investors (known at the time as "adventurers", and today as "venture capitalists"). The office building was known as a "count house" (from "account houses") and is where shareholder meetings and sometimes extravagant dinners were held and, on a more day-to-day basis, the workers were paid.
Kestrels are members of the falcon family and the most common bird of prey in Europe although in recent years in Britain they have been overtaken by the buzzard. They can be recognised from their fairly small size for a bird of prey, brown plumage and black tips to their tail when in flight. Despite having a wingspan of over half a metre, kestrels only weigh around 200g.
Kestrels are primarily vole specialists. If there are a shortage of voles they will feed on smaller rodents such as mice and shrews, lizards and even on insects if larger prey are not available. Particularly in urban areas where there aren't many voles they will also take birds such as sparrows and even those as large as starlings.
The size of the kestrel population is very dependent on the vole population. The mortality of young kestrels is high. Around 60-70% don't survive their first year and the main cause of this is starvation.
Kestrels are easily spotted when hovering, watching their prey. Whilst hovering, kestrels have the extraordinary ability to keep their head totally still, even in strong winds.
During winter months, kestrels mostly hunt from perches rather than by hovering as this burns too much energy at a time when food resources are scarce. The reason the birds don't do this all year round is that hovering is a much more productive way to catch prey so when temperatures are warmer and food is more abundant they switch strategies.
Over recent decades, the kestrel population has been in decline and is now about half of what it was at the start of the 1970s. The exact reasons are not known but it's strongly suspected it is connected to a decline in vole numbers perhaps due to changing farming methods. Reduced availability of nesting sites (e.g. in old trees) may also be a contributing factor.
The stripey chimney with the remains of a building alongside was a compressor house. This contained an absolutely massive steam engine over 60ft long with a flywheel that weighed nearly 20 tonnes, The compressed air powered drills underground.
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