The rain held off for us until very late afternoon, so we managed a full day of touring while remaining largely dry. The wind out here was pretty intense at times, but we can manage that.

Tin has been mined in Cornwall for about four thousand years (or more), and mines played a very important role in the show Poldark that introduced me and Meredith to Cornwall, so it seemed right that we pay a visit to a mine. The Geevor tin mine ran from about 1920 to 1991, and was a huge mine with a main shaft going sixteen hundred feet underground and had tunnels up to one mile long extending from it. The mine was turned into a museum a few years after it closed, and large industrial areas are sort of my thing, so I was excited to go.

But first, a walk. We got to the mine around 10:00, and our ticket was good for all day, so I wanted to take advantage of the rain-free time and hike out ten minutes to an older mine from the nineteenth century. It was closed for some reason today, but you could still wander the grounds looking at the crumbling buildings. The walk and the mine ruins are on the coast, so it is a pretty place for a walk. We did learn that the investors in the mine who bought a share for twenty pounds ended up being paid total dividends of over twelve thousand pounds. That is a solid investment.

We walked back to Geevor and started the tour. We spent about four hours wandering around the buildings of the mine and learned a ton of things about tin mining.  For example….
1. Mining is hot and hard work. Temperatures go up about a degree for every one hundred feet of depth.
2. Extracting tin is such a mind-numbingly difficult process, it makes me wonder how people four thousand years ago ever figured it out.
3. Tin is only located in a few places on Earth, and at one point, Cornwall supplied two thirds of the world’s supply of it.

Tin, to my eye, looks like quartz flecks imbedded in other rock. To get it out, it had to be mined and brought to the surface. Then it had to be pulverized and sorted and pulverized and sorted and pulverized and sorted. Then it got sorted again. Then it got washed by chemicals to pull out sulfides (in earlier times, people used a furnace, exposing them to arsenic). Then it gets run under a strong magnet to pull out iron bits from the tin sand. Finally, the tin that is seventy percent pure is bagged up to be sent to smelters. When running well, the mill could grab eighty percent of the tin ore from the rock that was mined. At the height of the mine, it employed 400 people, about 120 of whom were miners underground. The rest processed the ore or did other support jobs.

Miners worked one shift, and if they weren’t ready to blast the rock away at the end of the shift (when blasting was scheduled), then they couldn’t set off the explosives and didn’t get paid for the day, since they were paid on how much rock they moved. People in the processing mill worked three shifts to keep up.

The price of tin fell in the mid 1980s to one third of what it had been worth, and while the mine struggled on for a few years, it finally closed down in 1991.

The modern mine did also have an old hand-hewn mine on site, which dated back a couple hundred years or more; no one knows the exact age, since the mine isn’t on any maps anywhere. But it is safe to tour, so we got to go underground in a tiny tin tunnel. I only hit my head four or five times. Thank goodness you are required to wear a hard hat.

We also read that two kitties named Basil and Scraggs made the mine home right after it opened as a tourist attraction, and they lived to be fourteen and sixteen, which is impressively long for outdoor cats. They now appear as mascots in several parts of the museum.

We grabbed a convenient lunch/supper at the cafe around 4:00, and then headed back to the room to regroup for the evening. I took advantage of the time by shaving for the first time in eight days, since my poison ivy rash has finally cleared up off my face. I was as close to being bearded as I have ever been. But now I was ready for church.

We went back into Penzance and parked by the harbor and walked up the hill into town to the Penzance Baptist Church for a 6:30 evening service. The people were very kind (kindness seems a Cornish specialty), and the service was soothing. We sang familiar hymns, and we got to hear a sermon on lessons learned from Paul in 2 Corinthians where Paul talks about his thorn in his flesh and his boasting in his weakness. We were invited to stay after and eat cookies/biscuits, which is not a hard sell. We chatted with more kind Cornish people and stayed for about thirty minutes.

So we got in a good day of touring. In light of the hardships of mining or in light of eternal matters, a little late afternoon rain doesn’t seem so bad.