Today we spent the day at the mining area on the North Coast, we drove to Grevor Tin Mine and picked up our ticket, but we didn’t walk round the site as we had a tour booked at the next mine along which is Levant Mine. This is a tin mine which first appeared on mine maps in 1748, but it was in 1820 that the Levant Mining Company was formed with a capital of £400, approximately £35,000 in todays money, a group of 20 people divided the company into 80 shares, it was very successful and employed two families, the men worked the mine with some of the slightly older male children and the women worked breaking up the rocks to extract the ore. The mine is actually under the sea, shafts that reached over 300 fathom (549 metres) below the sea bed extended 1.6 km out from the cliffs. The people that worked in the mine didn’t live locally so they walked to work, then spent a hour getting to the bottom of the mine shaft before walking to the current seam and starting their 6 hour shift, at the end of which they did it all again in reverse. Originally men had to climb up and down ladders, on the way back up they had to carry the ore they had minded on their backs so that it could be sorted and weighed, they were all self employed so needed to make sure the ore they extracted was high quality. Families tended to work seams and sometimes brought parts of shares which meant that when the dividend were paid they received an additional income, however the downside was that if additional money was required to fund the mine they would be expected to contribute. This was a rich mine and over 20 years from 1821 dividend of approximately £12,500 per share were paid just over £1,000,000 per share in todays money! In 1840 an engine was installed to carry ore from the deep workings beneath the sea to the surface, in 1857 the man engine was installed. This aimed to make transporting miners up and down faster and easier, from what the guide said it would seem that most workers actually died from a heart attack climbing the ladder with the ore on their back, although some did die from accidents or silicosis from the glass and arsenic in the air, interestingly all the miners smoked as they believed that smoking coated their lungs and therefore would stop the effects of silicosis! The man engine was actually a ‘pole’ connected to a seesaw mechanism as it went down, the workmen stood on, as it got to the bottom they jumped off, allowed it to rise, then jumped on again on the next down, this allowed 120 men to go down the mine shaft in about 8 minutes. Unfortunately in 1919 there was a mining disaster where 31 men were killed and a number injured to such an extent that they never worked again. The government provided the mine owners with money, the assumption being that it would be used for a hardship fund but instead they mine owners put the money into getting the mine open again which left a number of families destitute, apparently there is still a lot of bad feelings in the local villages about this, to the extent that they don’t believe the National Trust should be allowed to open the site and show people around. The mine finally closed in 1930 as the price of Tin dropped dramatically during the depression, Geevor mine own the rights to the mine and did try and extract tin in the 1980s as the price of tin was really high, but the mine had flooded, the mines that ran out to sea, although they were really hot and the air was poor were normally very dry, but through the years of inactivity one of the seems had split and water had flooded the mine tunnel, it took the engineers two years to finally manage to stop the water entering the mine, unfortunately by this time the price had dropped again and it was no longer cost effective! Because only tin, copper and some arsenic were mined in the area, a company is actually working it way through the slag heaps to extract the other ore that has been left on the side, the mines contained lithium as well as another mineral that is used in touch screens! The mine also has a Bean Engine which a group of volunteers who were known as the Greasy Gang decided to try and restore, they managed to get funds and now it is run every day by one of the volunteers! The tour was fantastic, really interesting and I was surprised that by the time it ended we had been walking round the mine for an hour and a half! These mines form part of the Tin Coast, a seven mile stretch of coast with a rich mining history, that form this part of the World Heritage Site. From here we walked to Botallack Mine which is another mining complex although this one is not as complete as Levant, however, it is said that they are probably the most photographed engine houses in the area because of their location right on the cliff edge which does indeed make a great photo! It is also home to the Count house which was originally built as a mine office and was deliberately grand in style to promote confidence in the mine amongst shareholders, it was also where the the mine’s accounts (or cost books) were approved, they were prepared every two months by the purser and approved at a meeting of the shareholders, this meeting was always followed by an extremely good dinner with plentiful amounts of ale, wine and spirits. It was said that some people brought shares in mines just so they could attend the dinners! We never actually found the count house even when we drove round later! After we had looked at the mine area we walked back to Geevor mine which has the look of a much more modern mine, although there is a date cut into the wall of the adit (drainage) level of 1791. Geevor Tin Mines Limited was formed in 1911, the mine at that time was served mainly by the Wethered Shaft where sinking had started around 1910, as working were developed it became apparent that the future of the mine lay to the west, accordingly the sinking of Victory Shaft was commenced in 1919 at a point approximately 500 metres to west. Wethered Shaft remained in production until 1944 when all of the ore from underground and most transport of the men and materials was done via Victory Shaft. By 1975 this shaft reached 1575 feet, and by the time the Queen visited in 1980 it had 15 levels at an angle of 25 degrees below the horizontal, it eventually reached 21 levels (2100 feet or 630m before low tin prices prevented completion of further shafts. In October 1985 the sudden fall in the world price of tin resulted in the ’tin crisis’ where the price plummeted overnight from £10,000 per tonne to £3,400, finally in April 11986 Geevor Tin mine closed. With the appointment of a new chairman in 1987 a rescue programme was put into effect and preparations began to re-open the mine for full production, the price of tin was still low (at £4,000 per tonne) but it was estimated that sufficient ore was available to mine for up to 7 years, production started with less than 100 miners and a weekly target of 2,000 tonnes should have been an easy task, production gradually increased and by autumn the mine was in profit unfortunately the tin price fluctuated and in 1990 the mine went into a Care and Maintenance programme run by a skeleton staff and the miners were laid off, finally with no sign of improvement the pumps were switched off in May 1991 and Geevor was allowed to flood. To try and provide jobs in a deprived area the mine was turned into a museum and the heritage centre was opened in August 1993. We walked round each of the buildings which still contain a lot of the machinery which seems to still be working, a lot of the guys around the site had obviously worked the mines and they were really interesting to talk to. You are also allowed into one of the sections of the mine which show how small the seems are. By the time we had finished walking round it was about 3:30 so we decided to head back to the apartment for a bit of a relax before going out for something to eat and starting again tomorrow!
