Wheal Coates & St Agnes Mining Coast

Look at the little stone tower standing alone on the cliff edge ahead, with the blue sea beyond it. That is Towanroath, an engine house of the mine called Wheal Coates, and it is one of the most photographed sights in all of Cornwall. Beneath your feet, the ground is honeycombed with tunnels.

This whole coast around St Agnes Head was mined for tin and a little copper, chiefly in the nineteenth century. The lodes — the mineral-rich veins the miners chased — ran not just down into the cliffs but out under the sea itself. The rock here is mineral-rich Devonian slate, intruded long ago by molten granite, and it was that fiery meeting deep underground that laid down the tin and copper the miners spent their lives pursuing. To reach the lodes, men sank deep shafts, and water forever seeped in. So they built engine houses like Towanroath, raised in 1872 to hold a great steam pumping engine that laboured day and night to keep the workings dry. Nearby stood the Stamps and Whim engine house, which crushed the ore and wound men and rock up the shaft. Wheal Coates fell silent by the early twentieth century, and today this whole landscape is protected as part of the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site, cared for by the National Trust.

Now, let me point out some things to look for. First, Towanroath itself, perched on the very lip of the cliff above Chapel Porth. Notice how the granite blocks were dressed and fitted, and how the tall arched openings once framed the beam and the boiler. Second, look for the second ruin higher up the slope — the Stamps and Whim engine house — and imagine the two working together, one pumping, one hauling. Third, look at the heath around you. In late summer it blazes purple with heather and gold with gorse, a beauty grown directly over old workings. Fourth, listen and watch for the wildlife: skylarks rising and singing, stonechats ticking from the gorse tops, and, if you are lucky, choughs — the red-billed, red-legged crow that is Cornwall's emblem, returned to these cliffs after long absence. And fifth, look down to the sea, where grey seals sometimes rest on the rocks far below, and further along the coast towards Chapel Porth, where the beach is uncovered at low tide.

Here is something to hold in your mind. Picture this coast not silent and heather-clad, but roaring. In its working years the air was thick with the thump of stamps crushing ore, the hiss and sigh of steam engines, the shouts of men, the reek of coal smoke drifting on the sea wind. Underground, miners worked by candlelight in cramped, dripping levels driven far out beneath the waves, climbing hundreds of feet up and down ladders at the start and end of every shift. The engine house you are admiring for its beauty was, to them, the beating heart of their livelihood — the machine that kept the water down and the wages coming. When the tin price failed, all of it stopped, the fires went out, and the heath crept back over the ruins, softening with heather and gorse what had once been the loudest, busiest, most industrious place for miles.

From here the South West Coast Path threads on along the cliffs, past St Agnes Head towards Chapel Porth beach and on down the mining coast to Portreath. Take a last look at Towanroath standing against the sky — most beautiful, they say, at sunset, when the ruin turns to a black silhouette above a burnished sea. And as you walk, keep to the path: hidden shafts still lie unfenced in the heather, and the cliff edges are steep. Walk safe.