Redgate Smithy B&B
~ Cornish Mining Heritage ~
(around Minions and Caradon Hill)

Extensive Cornish Mining sites exist around the Minions and Caradon Hill areas, where copper mining was at its height during the 1840s to the 1890s. At Minions, you can visit the Minions Heritage Centre, that now occupies the Engine House of Houseman's Shaft, which was a part of the old South Phoenix Mine.

This area was granted World Heritage Site status in 2006

The Caradon Hill and Minions area (the major part of the "Liskeard Mining District") is one of ten areas of Cornwall and West Devon that won World Heritage Site status from the United Nations. This mining area, which is very local to us, includes the South Caradon Mine which during 2004 was also the subject of the BBC programme "Restoration", plus many other copper and tin mines, dated between 1700 and 1914.

Houseman's Engine House (now the Minions Heritage Centre)

Mining in Cornwall, whether it was for tin, copper, arsenic, or any of the other minerals mined here, was an extremely hard life, and miners lives were mostly short. If accident and injury did not find them first, then debilitating lung disease from the dusty unventilated atmosphere, and the long shifts "below grass", soon started to take their toll. Working underground, and climbing the long fathoms of ladders down and back to the surface at the end of every shift, was not for the faint-hearted.

John Harris was a nineteenth century miner-poet, and what he writes here is very evocative...

(Reference: "The Meads of Love: The Life and Poetry of John Harris 1820-84", Paul Newman 1994;
and quoted in Philip Payton's "Cornwall: A History", published in 1996 and 2004).

~
Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project ~ CHAHP

 

Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project is
now officially underway, with Stage 1 started
during December 2007.

CHAHP is a £2.8m project, funded largely
by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

 

After having won World Heritage Site status for Cornish mining heritage in the area, the Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project (CHAHP) will be building on this, and will provide for significant conservation of the natural and industrial heritage of this part of Cornwall. The project area covers not only Caradon Hill, but most of the south east corner of Bodmin Moor and south to Liskeard, and includes several significant copper and tin mining in the area (such as the South Caradon Mine shown above), as well as many other prehistoric sites, a large number of wildlife, geological and conservation area sites, and over 100 scheduled monuments. Stage 1 which is now underway, is the development stage of the four year £2.8million project, and this is being used to develop and plan the many project "programmes" that were proposed during the HLF bid process.

Another view of Rule's South Shaft Engine House at South Caradon Mine

The CHAHP Stage 2, if approved at the end of 2008/start 2009, will be the implementation phase of the project, aimed at conserving the landscape and working nature of the moor, managing access to the many historic, natural, archaeological and industrial mining heritage sites, plus the physical conservation and consolidation of mine site structures, and an extensive education and training programme; all of which will be involving as many local people as possible.

Rule's North Shaft at South Caradon Mine

Looking over towards Caradon Hill from the Cheesewring granite quarry, you can see along the remains of the track bed of the old Liskeard & Caradon Railway, leading back towards Minions and around Caradon Hill. Now returned back to nature, with its past now succumbing to slow decay and overgrowth, this whole landscape during the second half of the nineteenth century was a maelstrom of industry, mining engines, hammering and breaking of the ore, noise and smoke... It was areas like this, and similar mining areas, that witnessed the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and in particular the second phase of industrial revolution brought about during the 1840s/1850s, with the growth of steam power and the railways.

The sun may have set on Cornish mining's industrial past, but the rich heritage that is left to us from that past still needs to be carefully protected, within the overall management and conservation of both the natural and historical environments left in our care. Most importantly, Bodmin Moor needs to be respected as the living and working landscape that it still is, where the welfare of the livestock and land is preserved.

West Phoenix Mine ~ sometimes known as Silver Valley Mine