Introduction
The Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape is an embodiment of the
profoundly important process of non-ferrous metal mining, its
industrialisation, and its social and economic consequences. This
transformed the landscape between 1700 and 1914 and contributed
substantially to the development of the Industrial Revolution in the
rest of Britain. Cornwall pioneered the transfer of the British
industrial revolution overseas and thus played a key role in the growth
of a global capitalist economy.
Not only did the region dominate the world’s output of copper, tin and
arsenic, but the overall technological, social and economic contribution
made by Cornish mining was crucial to the development of modern
industrial society. The Cornish mining industry also played a leading
role in the diffusion of both metal mining and steam technology
around the globe.
The rapid industrialisation of the Cornish mining landscape required
unprecedented levels of technological innovation in the use of power,
transport and processing techniques, and in major social changes too,
including a massive population increase. As the rich lodes were
exploited in innovative ways, much of the landscape was re-written to
create thriving and prosperous settlements scattered throughout Cornwall
and West Devon. The substantial remains of this early industrial
landscape are an extraordinary testimony to the manner in which every
level of society helped to pioneer new methods of harnessing mineral
wealth.
Why were these industrial metals needed?
Tin was used in pewter ware and solder, and to make the tin plate on
which the canning industry was built. It was alloyed with copper to make
bronze for industrial applications, including machine bearings and
ship’s propellers. Copper was used to sheath the hulls of British ships
and to provide coinage. The sugar and dyeing industries used it to make
hollow-ware boilers, vats and piping. It is also the principal
constituent of brass and so provided crucial fittings for steam engines,
gun cartridges and brass trading goods. Cornish copper formed the basis
of the Bristol and then of the Birmingham brass industries. These were
the largest producers in the world at that time.
Arsenic was used extensively in the nineteenth century, for example in
the dyes and pigments of the Lancashire cotton industry. Demand grew
during the last quarter of the century when it became a popular
insecticide. It helped to control Colorado Beetle which had devastated
potato, tobacco and other crops across America.
Productivity - one of the world’s most important
non-ferrous mining regions
Cornwall and Devon contained Europe’s principal tin deposits and
satisfied substantial demand over four millennia. The region’s ancient
mining industry was founded on the expertise gained in the working of
tin and other metal ores by the Celtic Britons and the organisation of
the medieval Stannaries. During the nineteenth century, half of
Cornwall’s output came from the Camborne and Redruth Mining District and
until the late 1870s Cornwall and West Devon produced more tin than any
country in the world.
Larger-scale tin smelting began during the early eighteenth century
following the introduction of reverberatory furnace technology.
(Ultimately this replaced the blowing houses that had been in operation
since the medieval period). Virtually all the ore from Cornwall and
Devon was smelted within the region until the twentieth century.
Copper production from West Cornwall during the first three decades of
the nineteenth century amounted to two-thirds of the world’s supply.
During the 1850s, Devon Great Consols in West Devon became the largest
single producer in Western Europe.
Copper smelting ceased within the nominated Site in 1819. Swansea in
South Wales then became the global centre for the trade, much of it
under the control of Cornish entrepreneurs. During the second half of
the nineteenth century copper became the essential metal of the
electrical and communications industries. Arsenic production in Britain
began as a by-product of tin and copper mining in West Cornwall during
the early nineteenth century. In the 1870s Devon Great Consols, and a
few other mines in West Devon and East Cornwall, produced half the
world’s supply.
All arsenic ores from within the nominated Site were refined in the
region.
Technical aspects of ore-processing (‘dressing’) were pioneered within
the nominated Site and imported techniques were improved. They enabled
ores to be mined which had previously been considered unworkable. The
diffusion of such technology to mines overseas proved to be of
international significance.
The impact of mining on the Cornwall and West Devon landscape during the
period 1700-1914 was large-scale and the speed at which the industry was
abandoned resulted in an unparalleled relict primary mining landscape.
It features more than 3,000 shafts, numerous waste tips and over 200
engine houses, together with the widespread remains of tin and arsenic
processing.
Industrial
infrastructure
Transport was crucial. Supplies had to be brought in and minerals -
particularly copper ore - had to be moved out from the mines to the
new purpose-built mineral ports. A high-capacity transport network
developed during the early nineteenth century to meet this demand.
Remains of this network occur right across the nominated Site. There
is an internationally significant group of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century industrial ports, together with the tramways,
railways and canals which connected them to the mines.
Ancillary industries developed in the towns and ports to service the
mines. Tin smelting became highly capitalised and in the nineteenth
century foundries and engineering works produced the steam engines,
rock drills and other mining equipment (particularly steam-driven
machinery) which pushed out the technological barriers, enabling mines
to be dug deeper, made larger and process their ore efficiently. The
impact of these developments was felt throughout the mining world.
There are substantial remains of these ancillary industries within the
nominated Site. Important concentrations occur in the new industrial
towns of Hayle, Charlestown and Camborne, in Tavistock, Redruth and in
the Kennall Valley on the edge of the Gwennap Mining District.
Innovation and export
The Cornish mining industry was characterised by prolific innovation,
sustained by an influx of capital, attracted to what had become a
crucible of industrial development. The near-vertical metalliferous
vein deposits could be exploited only by deep-shaft mining. Local
pioneers invented the Newcomen atmospheric steam engine and first
applied it to a metal mine, probably between 1710 and 1714, in West
Cornwall. The expense of shipping coal to the Cornish mining region
from Bristol and South Wales stimulated the need for energy
efficiency. Newcomen’s engines were vastly improved by Cornish
engineers during the second half of the eighteenth century.
The Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, large-scale copper
mining attracted Boulton & Watt to Cornwall; a region that became
their principal market. Their patent expired in 1800 and Cornish
engineers went on to develop high-pressure steam pumping technology
which resulted in the Cornish beam engine and boiler, the most
efficient equipment of its kind at that time anywhere in the world. It
also led to the development of steam as a method of motive power by
pioneers elsewhere whose experiments eventually resulted in the mass
movement of goods and people.
Cornish mining expertise and products began to be exported throughout
the world during the second decade of the nineteenth century, wherever
mining operators sought the latest technology and working practices.
(Often these mines were developed with the help of British capital
too). The core of the export trade consisted of steam engines, the
engineers needed to install and operate them, mining equipment and the
miners needed to superintend mining operations.
One globally successful export was the Cornish safety fuse which was
used for blasting. This too was pioneered on the Site. It made a
significant technological contribution to the industry as well as
saving countless miners’ lives. The Cornish mining industry as a whole
made a very specific contribution to metal mining throughout the
world, particularly during the nineteenth century.
Cornish engine houses, which are among the most distinctive industrial
buildings in the world, survive in Spain, Mexico, South Africa and
Australia. They are striking evidence of this world-wide impact. As to
the Cornish engine houses on the nominated Site, they are not only
iconic, they represent the largest concentration of such technological
monuments anywhere in the world.
Industrial society
Cornwall was one of Europe’s earliest industrial regions, with a
complex and dispersed industrial society. It was unusual in that it
never developed a dominant large town or city containing the
political, economic and institutional elite, around which the county
might have cohered. Instead, ownership and control was spread among
the small towns throughout the Cornish countryside. Landowners and
merchants diversified their portfolios across mining, banking and
smelting enterprises. So capital was dispersed, with no direct social
control. The owning class exercised their power through agents and
stewards. Mine agents, more usually known in Cornwall as ‘captains’,
imposed workplace discipline and social leadership. This was often
reinforced by their position as lay preachers in the Methodist chapels
which dominated the Cornish religious landscape after the Revivals of
1799 and 1814.
This social structure enabled mining communities to be relatively
independent. In addition, the practice of leasing out smallholdings on
unenclosed land in the mining districts enabled a proportion of miners
to build their cottages, rear pigs and grow vegetables. This decreased
their dependence on both market and mine and helped to maintain the
economic role of the family unit. It also led to more egalitarian
relations between men and women within the household. Yet despite the
scattered and independent nature of small mining communities in the
eighteenth century, they tended to be grouped geographically in quite
dense concentrations according to the location of particular mineral
resources.
The copper industry was exceptional in that its growth rate exceeded
every other major national industrial sector. Eighteenth-century
copper mining was principally confined to a small area between Hayle
and Gwennap. This became Cornwall’s core industrial district, bounded
by the towns of Truro, Penzance and Falmouth. In cultural terms, this
small area was extraordinarily dynamic and innovative. Two newspapers
were established in Truro within a decade: the Royal Cornwall Gazette
in 1800 and the West Briton (which still exists under the same name)
in 1810.
Shortly afterwards a number of literary institutes were established.
The most significant were the Royal Geological Society in Penzance
(1814), the Royal Institution of Cornwall in Truro (1818) and the
Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth (1833); all three
continue to contribute to Cornwall’s rich cultural life. Mineralogy
and geology and their practical application to the mining and mineral
processing industries, were studied extensively throughout the
nominated Site. The ferment of engineering and scientific endeavour
associated with the development, by deep mining, of one of the world’s
most mineralogically diverse orefields stimulated the ground-breaking
efforts of Cornish scientists whose contributions helped to lay the
foundations of geological, chemical and physical science.
The cultural identity of Cornwall and West Devon was transformed by
mining and its infrastructure during the course of the nineteenth
century, aided by the extension of copper mining to the St Austell
district in the 1810s, to east Cornwall in the 1830s and renewed
activity across the Tamar to Tavistock in the 1840s. By the time of
the 1861 census more than 38,000 men, women and children were employed
directly in Cornwall’s mining industry, almost a quarter of the entire
workforce. At its peak around half of all families in Cornwall were
dependent on the extractive industries while even more were affected
by the rise and fall of the mining economy.
Global migration
Cornwall was locked into the global economy at an early stage. As a
leader in mining expertise its miners were in demand in other, newer
mining regions. By the 1820s Cornish miners were being recruited for
mines in Latin America. Within a generation a flourishing culture of
emigration had been created and links with North America and Australia
forged. During the fall in world copper prices in the late 1860s and
the crisis decade of the 1870s, when tin prices were also in
recession, the Cornish had a ready-made option. They left. Indeed,
Cornwall became one of Europe’s major emigration regions with perhaps
over 200,000 people leaving in the century after 1830. Although not
all emigrants were miners, it was to mining communities overseas that
Cornish traditions were most obviously transferred, replicating their
familiar Cornish mining landscapes. This gave the Cornish Mining
industrial region a global significance, exporting its culture, as
well as its mining expertise and its copper and tin, world-wide. |
