The Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape received full World Heritage Site designation in 2006. This placed the two counties’ industrial wastelands alongside the Taj Mahal and The Great Wall of China! The new World Heritage Site encompasses a huge number of post-industrial mining ruins. They are clustered in ten different districts stretching from the Tamar Valley west to St Just, Britain’s most westerly town.
Why exactly did they bother? I quote …
‘This cultural landscape is a testament to the profoundly important process of pioneer metal mining, to its industrialisation, and to the innovations which occurred here and had a fundamental influence on the mining world at large during the nineteenth century.’
It’s good to see important industrial archaeology preserved, and Cornwall’s former economic importance commemorated. Otherwise, let’s be totally honest. Awarding World Heritage Status to a load of abandoned mining spoils and ruins sounds on paper like the worst idea ever.
But then, you actually experience it …
I am so proud of having been, if for only a short time, a tin miner. I am delighted at the prospect of the mines being re-opened for all kinds of reasons – economic, the tidying up of some of the sites, and the return of some true wealth generation.
From my experience and conversations with some of the last generation of tin miners there are still huge amounts of ore left in Cornwall. It will alter the landscape, change the demography, and give some local people the chance to own their own house in the place they grew up. It will give some of those miners caught up in the last Cornish diaspora the chance to return.
There will of course be those people who want to maintain the living museum that they have bought into. I agree that the development should be sensitive, but the derlict mine engines houses we now so love were the simplest, least expensive way of building at the time.
To have ridden the cage from deep within the earth, to arrive at the surface, tired and filthy, after a night shift and see the sun rise over Carn Brea is to have lived. World heritage is in the experience as much as the legacy.
Wonderful. Thanks for sharing, Dillon.
Mark