Up the hill from Gunnislake, Drakewalls mine was the first stop for the Man Engine on the huge mechanical puppet’s celebratory journey through the world heritage mining landscapes of Cornwall this summer. Now the site is quiet again, bereft of the admiring crowds. Consolidated ruins of engine houses and chimneys remain from the 19th century, when this mine was the largest tin producer in east Cornwall, employing 398 people at its peak. Wolframite, a tungsten mineral, was separated from the tin ore and, by 1890, arsenic and copper were also being produced and loaded in sidings that connected to the new mineral railway. Contemporary reports described underground caverns that could be “traversed only by boat”. Earlier opencast excavations were filled in, but there remains a walled-in linear chasm or “gunnis”, choked with ferns and bushes. Come 1895, production was almost finished: “Coals stopped, mine stopped, water risen in the shaft.”
In recent years, the spoil tips and the dressing floors, where ore was processed, have been covered in earth, and seeded with grass and flowers. Dog walkers tread paths around the dips and hummocks, now bright with the summery purples of self-heal, thistle, buddleia, rosebay and knapweed, interspersed with yellow vetch, fleabane and lady’s mantle. Birch trees are already shedding withered leaves and, from the highest point with its rattling wind turbine, views extend eastwards, across steep woodland adjoining the Tamar and Morwell’s arable fields, towards misted Dartmoor.
Downslope, inside the modern building of the Tamar Valley centre, volunteers copy and record information for the parish archive. Today, Tony Dingle is working on the history of the football club, but he tells me about his grandmother and her two sisters who worked as bal maidens in the local mines; Elizabeth, Fanny and Louisa Phare from Dimson started work at the age of 13, breaking up ore, picking and sorting the valuable minerals from waste. By 1900 the two older sisters had followed their mining husbands and emigrated to Iron Mountain, Michigan; the two Phare brothers also went there.
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