Botallack Mines, St Justs. Crude Calciner chambers and chimney used for the extraction of arsenic from the mine ore.
Botallack was a submarine mine with tunnels extending under the sea, in places for half a mile. Over its recorded lifetime the mine produced around 14,500 tonnes of tin, 20,000 tonnes of copper, and 1,500 tonnes of arsenic. An estimated million tonnes of waste would have been dug up with the minerals.[2] It is unclear how far back mining activity goes in this location. Early records date from the 1500s. Some archaeological evidence points to mining here in the Roman era or even as far back as the Bronze Age. Henry Boynes was captain of the mine in the early 18th-century and opened a ″deep adit level,″ which was driven to the Corpus Christi lode in the higher mine. The first steam-engine was put to work at Carnyorth Moor (later part of the Botallack sett) in either 1795 or about 1810, depending on the source. In the first half of the 19th-century, the average price of Botallack tin was £64 4s a ton. The abolition of tin duty of 4s per 120 lbs to the Duke of Cornwall in 1838 helped to keep the mine operating despite a decline in the price of tin to £45 per ton.[3] In the 1860s a new diagonal shaft was dug. A visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1865, when they descended the shaft, created a mini-boom in tourism, causing the mine operators to charge visitors a guinea per person. Increasing supply of tin – initially from Malaysia, Banka Island, and Sumatra, and in the 1870s onwards from Australia – along with a fall in demand for tinplate in the American market, caused the price of tin to fall, causing many Cornish mines to close.[3] The managers decided in January 1883 to stop the Botallack and Crowns engines, because the number of men employed below ground was not sufficient to meet the costs of keeping the engines going.[4] On 2 October 1883 the recently renewed setts, which extended over 2 miles ( km) – comprising Wheal Cock, the Crowns, Carnyorth and Higher Mine – were put up for auction as a ″going concern″. It included four
Size: 4480px × 6720px
Location: Bottallack , St Just, Cornwall, UK
Photo credit: © Roger Hollingsworth / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: arsenic, bottallack, calciner, chamber, chimney, copper, cornwall, heritage, st, tin, unesco, world
