Botallack & Levant Mines

Look down the cliff face below you. Clinging to the rock, halfway between the path and the surging Atlantic, are two small stone towers — the Crowns engine houses of Botallack mine. There is no more dramatic image in all of Cornish mining. And astonishing as it seems, the miners here did not merely dig down. They tunnelled out, beneath the sea.

Botallack worked tin and copper from the eighteenth century into the late nineteenth, and its most extraordinary levels ran far out under the Atlantic, following the lodes deep beneath the seabed. This is granite country, the cliffs seamed with the mineral veins that tempted the miners downward and seaward, ever further from dry land. Men laboured in those submarine workings by candlelight, in heat and streaming damp, and in storms, it is said, they could hear boulders rolling and grinding on the rocks above their heads — the sea itself, thundering over them in the dark. It took a particular kind of nerve to keep working with that sound overhead. The two Crowns engine houses you are looking at pumped the water from those shafts and wound the men and ore up from far below. Just along the coast stands Levant Mine, worked from around 1820, where the National Trust has restored a great Cornish beam engine of 1840 to hissing, breathing life. Both are part of the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site, and the coast path runs right past them.

Now, let me point out some things to look for. First, the Crowns engine houses themselves, just below the path — take your time over them, for the sight of those towers braced against the cliff above the white water is one you will not forget. Second, look at the granite all around you, seamed and stained where the mineral lodes run; this is the very rock the miners chased downward and seaward. Third, walk on to Levant, and if you can time your visit for a steam day, see the 1840 beam engine at work — the oldest of its kind still in steam, rocking on its great cast-iron beam. Fourth, watch the clifftop heath for kestrels hovering, stonechats on the gorse, and the red-billed choughs that have returned to these cliffs. And fifth, look down to the coves and rocks below, where grey seals rest and seabirds ride the wind.

Here is a story this coast should never forget. At Levant, men were carried up and down the deep shaft by an ingenious device called a man-engine — a great rod, driven by steam, with little platforms fixed to it, on which miners rode from step to step as the rod rose and fell. For decades it saved them the exhausting climb up hundreds of feet of ladder. But in 1919 the man-engine failed for the last time, and Levant never recovered; the mine closed soon after. Today the restored beam engine steams on in tribute to all who worked here — a monument not only to Cornish ingenuity, but to the courage it took, every single shift, to go down into the dark beneath the sea. To stand beside it as it rocks and breathes, its great beam rising and falling, is to hear the true voice of this coast: the sound that once carried on the wind for miles, the pulse of an entire way of life now gone.

From here the South West Coast Path carries on south along this magnificent, brooding coast, towards Cape Cornwall and the long approach to Land's End. Take a last look at the Crowns, holding fast to their cliff above the waves, and marvel at what was dared and done here. Keep well to the path — the old workings and cliff edges are treacherous. Walk safe.