Whenever we feel like stretching our legs, but only have a time "window" of an hour or so, we take a quick walk up the road - past the Wheal Kitty estate and along the top of the cliffs between Trevellas and Trevaunance Coves.

This post contains photographs from two such walks: one made on 20th. April 2007 and the other made on the 5th. February.

I'm posting the later walk first, since it was earlier in the day and the orange sunset light of the February photographs sit more easily at the end of the sequence.

Our bungalow is only about 50 meters away from Wheal Kitty Lane, which leads in a large semicircle past the entrance to the Wheal Kitty estate and then back down the hill to Peterville.

The first part of this lane is bordered by paddocks, divided from the road by a hedgerow of thorn trees, which at this time of year exude a fountain of snowy blossoms so thick that it's barely possible to discern any green amongst them.



Dredging through the long-distant memories of my country childhood, I thought initially they were hawthorn bushes putting out early "mayflower" blossoms.

But having looked in some reference books and consulted members of the family with better memories than mine, I can now say that they are blackthorns.



To my taste, blackthorn blossoms are much prettier than hawthorn "mayflowers." Hawthorn leaves are already quite well grown before the blossom sprays out, while blackthorn leaves are only very tiny when the bush flowers.

The glaring white blossoms contrast strongly with the ruddy-black twigs and viciously long thorns, giving the blackthorn a much "purer" and austere look - strongly reminiscent of paintings made in the minimalist calligraphic style of China and Japan, which I prefer to the rather heavy oil-based paintings of the West.

Oriental paintings often have insects in them - cicadas in the case of one of my favourite masters, Chao Shao-An - so this photograph has a bumble-bee to complete the Chinese allusion...!



Blackthorn is often the first flowering tree in the countryside - blooming from mid to late April, depending on the region (although with global warming it's getting more and more difficult to predict when flowers will actually bloom - April 2007 was the warmest English April since records begun in 1659 and the birds were getting so confused that they were mating and laying eggs far earlier than normal.)

But for some reason it's not the blackthorn that is the most celebrated blossoming thorn in English folklore. It's the Common Hawthorn.

In Oxfordhire, in my youth, the rhyme "ne'er cast a clout 'til may is out" was still often quoted to warn people not to pack away their winter "clouts" (clothing) away until the hawthorn (May Blossom or Mayflowers) had bloomed - heralding the arrival of warm weather for the rest of the year. (The "may" in the rhyme refers to may blossom, by the way, not to the end of the month of May - an example of how old rhymes have become confused by a more scientic age.)



In Celtic folklore hawthorn was also associated with purification ritual and with the passage to the other world which shamans such as druids could transit while in a trance.
It was considered unlucky to cut the tree when it wasn't in bloom, but mayflowers were commonly cut and made-up into a May Bush during the period of the Beltane festival, when the animals were purified by driving them between two bonfires to bring them a fertile year. Beltane and other spring fertility festivals today survive as May Day.

As far as I know, blackthorn has no such druidical associations - but at least you have the photographs...! (There will be a photograph of hawthorn at the end of the next post - for comparison - by the way.)



The flowers of the blackthorn and hawthorn are very similar. It's the leaves (or lack of them) that are the give-away. But there is no confusing the two during the autumn, since the blackthorn bears the matte-skinned blue-black sloe, while hawthorn bears red "haws."
This blossom also had a bumble-bee in attendance - which is why the flowers are overexposed. (Sorry - it's hard to expose for both...) There were several bumble-bees gathering nectar and pollen along the lane.

We saw a possible reason "why" a little later. There was a bumble-bee nest in an old animal burrow not far from the path above Trevaunance Cove. We passed it while we were walking there later.

A well-known 20th century myth says that the laws of aerodynamics prove "that the bumblebee should be incapable of flight as it does not have the capacity (in terms of wing size or beat per second) to achieve flight with the degree of wing loading necessary...[and that] the bumblebee succeeds [only] under 'the power of its own arrogance' (McFadden 2007)."

"The origin of this myth has been difficult to pin down with any certainty ... It is believed that the calculations which purported to show that bumblebees cannot fly are based upon a simplified linear treatment of oscillating aerofoils .... This ignores the effect of dynamic stall, an airflow separation inducing a large vortex above the wing ... the bumblebee can fly because its wings encounter dynamic stall in every oscillation cycle." (Wikipedia)



I've mentioned in the post about our walk "From St. Agnes to St. Piran" how the Wheal Kitty mine's engine house has been renovated and is in use by business. But the history of the mine is less well documented than other mines - like Wheal Coates and Wheal Friendly.

Wheal Kitty seems to have started operation around about 1850 and have run until 1930. It was said to have been a profitable mine due to the high quality seams of tin in the area covered by its mining lease. The mine is supposed to have employed 250 people at its peak and to have supported 4 engine houses - but this is where the literature and the archeology seem to diverge, since only one engine house is obvious today.

This photograph is taken from the coastal side. The remains of the concrete wall coated with ivy in the centre is part of a large concrete building, presumably used for processing the ore. It is not a pretty ruin (apart from a few pieces of urban graffiti done by local kids) which is why I've hidden most of it with a gorse bush!



The rock processed by the Wheal Kitty mine ended up as several large spoil-heaps, which are still mostly bare of vegetation. The unstable scree seems to be too unstable for plants to anchor, except in the lower gullies.

The highest spoil heaps end quite near to the cliff top. You can see the height they reach by reference to the small boy in this picture, who was dragging a wooden pallett to a camp he was making on the far side.



The scale and location of the spoil is even clearer in this shot, where the boy has reached the base of the second heap.

There is a kind of austere beauty to this post-apocalyptic/industrial scene at any time, although it benefits most from the orange light of sunset (see photos below) when the heaps gain an imposing mass like large red sand-dunes.

At the same time, as you walk, you find yourself in a "what if" quandry. There are many ruined buildings from the mines which are seriously unattractive and the countryside might be even prettier had the companies been obliged to dump the spoiled rock back into the deserted mine shafts.

At the end of the day, the relationship between Cornish mining and the environment is something of a "double-edged sword." It has left a number of eye-sores, but the fact that the spoil and processes like the burning-off of arsenic made the land unfit for agriculture has prevented much of the Cornish coastline from becoming farmland, and preserved some of the ancient wildness for succeeding generations.



The paths through the spoil tend to hug the lowest gullies and may have started life as water run-off.

This is also where the rock is most stable, so it's here that some hardy plants like heather have gained a foot-hold.



These paths are not much used - only by a few walkers and some kids with track-bikes - but the rock dust is so loose that even minor traffic is enough to keep the path clear.



Whenever the paths rise over low colls between the heaps, the instability of the gravel and scree becomes even more apparent.

You often find yourself expending twice as much energy as you'd expect as your feet slip and slither beneath you.



If you look at the rock spoil itself, the surface is quite pretty with a variety of subtle striations in a variety of greys and copper-russet tones.

The rock is quite brittle, but has a pleasant ring when struck.

From 1871 the Wheal Kitty mine was used to extract copper as well as tin ore, although there is little trace of green copper-oxide compounds in the remaining rock.



Shot from below against a blue sky, the view of the spoil is even more dramatic and again bears comparison with large natural dunes.



Tin was one of the earliest metals known and because of its hardening effect on copper was used as a component of bronze during the Bronze Age (as early as 3500 BC.)

Tin mining has been an important part of the Cornish economy since about 2000 BC and - because of the purity of the ore - the product attracted traders not only from nearly countries like Gaul, but also with more distant trading civilizations like Phoenicia and Rome, even prior to the conquest of Britain by Emperor Claudius in 43 AD. In fact, for several centuries, Mediterranean traders knew the British Isles as "the Tin Islands."

For most of their history, the Cornish exploited alluvial tin by panning streams and beaches (such as that in the Jericho Valley, leading to Trevellas Cove) or seams close to the surface. But the richer seams of tin and copper ore were often deep underground, below the level of the water-table, so it was only with the invention of large steam-powered pumping engines (from Newcomen's "atmospheric engine" of 1712 to Richard Trevithick's high pressure single-acting "Cornish engines" developed near the end of the 18th. Century) that deep mines became economically viable.



At its height, the Cornwall had around 600 steam engines pumping out the mines - but by the late 19th. Century competition from countries like Malaysia (where the high quality tin used in products such as Royal Selangor pewter could be dredged much more economically than tin brought from deep mines) saw the beginning of the end of the Cornish tin industry.

Rock removed from the ground was initially pulverised with stamps. Since mined ore usually contained less than 1% tin, the rock then needed to be processed and "concentrated." Extensive "dressing floors" (usually laid out down a slope to reduce unnecessary handling) were used to crush and grade rock to a uniform size range and separate the ore from waste (often hydraulically.)

Concentration was usually done using gravity separation in buddles (a circular pit with rotating brushes) or by using ground ore slurry in vanners (inclined, laterally vibrated belts) to separate the heavier ore due to its higher density.

Arsenic removal was done in a "burning house" where ores were roasted in a process called "calcination" in order to drive off impurities like sulphur and arsenic. Other contaminants were removed by flotation and magnetism. The processed ore was then bagged for sale to smelters and the waste dumped on spoil heaps like this one - just outside the ugly and graffitied ruin I mentioned earlier (an example of how the camera can isolate beauty from ugliness, just like the miners isolated ore from spoil...)



I mentioned earlier about the walk we'd done in February, close to sunset and how the orange evening light made the post-apocalyptic scene (if that's not a contradiction in terms - it's just that mine areas often look as if they are just recovering from a heavy pounding from field-artillery, like Flanders field - but with the barbed wire gone, the trenches filled and gorse instead of poppies) more beautiful than in the daytime.

Actually, now I look more closely, I think the strong contrast between the blue sky and the salmon, rust and cream rock spoil is prettier in the daytime. In the evening, the orange from the sun - which warms the colour of the land - also softens the blue in the sky to a colder pallor and the scenery becomes less dramatic, despite the long shadows.
This is the view of Trevellas beach as the sun drops close to St. Agnes beacon in the west.




Since we were walking in February the lowering sun meant rapidly lowering temperatures as well! Thus the walk was quite a brisk one, so that we could take in the scenery without taking cold. The light might look warm, but the air definitely wasn't!