Hinterland definitions :
- a region lying inland from a coast
- a region remote from urban areas, a region lying beyond major metropolitan or cultural centers
Day 3
This entry and its included photographs are also a separate blog post in its own right found here. The words and images are an important part of this reflective journey through the West Penwith mining landscape, and developing some further understanding of landscape being existential; ie being multi-layered with multiple meanings. There are also multiple participants in experiencing/deciphering the images I have created; myself with the original exploration and selection of micro-landscapes to photograph, and those viewing the images. Where does any ‘phenomenology’ come into being; with me as the photographer ( which I believe to be true ) or with those who are viewing and creating their own internal associations? What is that relationship?
Also I have recently introduced the notion of a ‘palimpsest’, a living tapestry of layers which reveals all of those layers despite new information being added. Can a town, or a region, and its many stratas be regarded as a palimpsest?
Blog Post
I have recently considered the idea that the landscape around us is multi-factorial and multi-dimensional. A landscape may be viewed as a collection of layers of occupation where marks left by successive communities are similar in conceptual terms to those marks left by painters on a canvas. The only variable is the perceptual and selective preferences chosen by each person passing through that landscape; that landscape will be critically different for everyone who passes through.
Over the past few days I have spent time in West Penwith, west Cornwall, during the time of its annual Lafrowda Festival. The Festival’s stated aims are :
- To advance education in art and culture in particular, but not exclusively, in the St Just in Penwith area.
- To promote arts for the benefit of the public generally, and in particular for the inhabitants of St Just in Penwith, by promoting an annual festival of arts and music
This year’s theme was ‘Going Underground’ and a range of activities and performances were organised to reflect this theme.
The town and surrounding area is most well known for its mining and Wesleyan Heritage. It maybe difficult to entirely separate them over the last two hundred years. What is left of the mining environment has been formally declared a World Heritage Site and is now protected. Cornish miners and mining engineers are also celebrated for taking their skills and knowledge around the world, assisting with the development of mining industries in many countries. An important part of that ‘diaspora’ has been the strong following of Christian faith; both the Church of England and the Methodist Church has played important roles. The accumulated temporal, spiritual and industrial layers of all of these events provide a living tapestry upon which St Just continues to shine its unique star.
These photographs provide a snapshot of how, on those few days over the rain and mist at Lafrowda Festival, I saw those complex and subtly resonating layers of local landscape.
On Penzance sea front, left of the Western-most railway station in Great Britain and looking out over Mount’s Bay, is a sea defence system in the form of a long curling concrete wave. Graffiti has been drawn along its entire length. Just to its left is the cliff at Chyandour and just beyond the cliff, and the old Bolitho estate offices where the Chyandour stream chuckles into that Bay, the great tin smelting plant stood for some 250 years, its large 4 chimneyed workplace now a coal yard.
In an English county which begat Alfred Wallis and a modernist movement, not much appears to have changed in terms of artistic sentiment. Looking at the ‘tags’ of the graffiti, the intellectual might plaintively scream ‘but what of the narrative? and traditionalists might not have noticed that the world has welcomed the ubiquity of street art into its national and international galleries. Others might celebrate that the voices of minorities have a canvas too. At its most socially and artistically reductive it is worthless graffiti, to others it signifies more.
A palimpsest is a document which provides layer upon layer of visual information without essentially occluding older detail; it is a testimony to different eras, time frames, opinions, cultural associations and even religious convictions captured in one expressive form. It is a living document which may continue to develop as a part of an evolutionary process, detailing something more immersive than a static present.
These continue my interest in street art, or even street semiotics. I wonder how many people have contributed to these works, over what kind of period, and who those people were, where they live and what their lives consist of? In a mining area, they beguilingly remind me of tin mines, where layers of human activity and endeavour and thought created something, dug down deep into a firmament of some kind. They are Breton’s surrealism and Höch’s collage. They inter-act with the sea, buffer with nature, blister in the sun and wrestle with the politics of our post-truth world.
The street art on the concrete wave at Penzance and the nearby tinners’ cliffs can be considered palimpsests, another word for the accretion of multi-layered industrial and cultural typography as described by Schama.
A series of images of the Botallack Count House environs, now a National Trust cafe and holiday let, is below. The cafe here, managed by staff from Geevor Mine, is marvellous for coffee and cake. It is also the venue of a monthly folk club meeting and is famous within Cornwall for its association with Cornish bard and folk singer Brenda Wootten.
The cafe overlooks the remains of the Botallack mine sett; Botallack Mine, Wheal Cock, The Arsenic Works, West Wheal Owles and Wheal Edward dominate the coastal landscape here.
Although worked manually as a mine before, the first steam engine was installed in approximately 1800 at Carnyorth Moor
Wikipedia tells us that :
The following shafts were working in 1884,
- Botallack engine-shaft, 220 fathoms (1,320 ft; 400 m) deep and worked with a 30 inches (760 mm) cylinder
- Crowns engine-shaft, 130 fathoms (780 ft; 240 m) deep and worked with a 36 inches (910 mm) cylinder
- Wheal Cock engine-shaft, 160 fathoms (960 ft; 290 m) deep and worked with a 30 inches (760 mm) cylinder
- Carnyorth engine-shaft, 130 fathoms (780 ft; 240 m) deep and worked with a 30 inches (760 mm) cylinder
- Wheal Cock skip-shaft, 170 fathoms (1,020 ft; 310 m) deep
- Botallack skip-shaft, 205 fathoms (1,230 ft; 375 m) deep
- Carnyorth skip-shaft, 124 fathoms (744 ft; 227 m) deep
- Wheal Hazzard skip-shaft, 100 fathoms (600 ft; 180 m) deep
- Chy Cornish skip-shaft, 100 fathoms (600 ft; 180 m) deep
- Pearce’s skip-shaft, 130 fathoms (780 ft; 240 m) deep
- Bullion skip-shaft, 185 fathoms (1,110 ft; 338 m) deep
- Durloe skip-shaft, 70 fathoms (420 ft; 130 m) deep
- Rodd’s skip-shaft, 60 fathoms (360 ft; 110 m) deep
- Boscawen diagonal-shaft, about 500 fathoms (3,000 ft; 910 m) long, perpendicular depth 240 fathoms (1,440 ft; 440 m) and 300 fathoms (1,800 ft; 550 m) under the sea
- Approximately 10 other shafts varying in depth from a few fathoms to 50 fathoms (300 ft; 91 m) deep.[7]
A total of 265 workers were employed and the monthly wage was approximately £800 per month. The average monthly yield of the mine was about 19 tons of tin, 3 tons of copper and 4 tons of arsenic. The mine closed in 1895 as a result of falling tin and copper prices.
Some considered it the centre or the hub of the mining industry in West Penwith.
A series of images below portray the famous Crowns mines almost at sea level at Botallack. It was here the incline began its descent into the sub-ocean rock at 32 degrees.
Wikipedia suggests :
There are two engine houses and the remains of another pair on the cliff slopes above; the mine extends for about 400 metres out under the Atlantic ocean; the deepest shaft is 250 fathoms (about 500 metres) below sea level. The workings of Botallack Mine extend inland as far as the St Just to St Ives road, and at times included Wheal Cock further to the north-east.
The mine buildings on Botallack Cliffs are protected by the National Trust. There are two arsenic works opposite the Botallack Mine count house. At the top of the cliffs there is also the remains of one of the mine’s arsenic-refining works.
The mineral Botallackite has its type locality here.
In my photographs I have chosen to try to present the ruins of the engine houses simply, featuring their physicality and strength and monumentality within their dramatic setting, making no allusion to anything other than their history as robust and stolid architectural tools to mankind, and their ambitious mining owners. The bulk and size of the granite blocks are sculptural in their heft and regularity, but there is no attempt to create a more reflective aesthetic. The taut rusting wire images may symbolise something other, maybe the sliding descent into an industrial linearality of the history of these structures, or a suggestion of the physical sliding act of mine shafts descending. The smoothness of that implied descent is misleading, though the rust and decay suggests a linear process of industrialised aging and change. The two bolts on the wire are entirely intentional.
Tellee about Wheal Owles, sir—the flooded Cornish mine!
’Ow the waters chuck’d the levels where the sun don’t never shine;
’Ow the twenty men are lyin’—stark, lifeless, lumps of clay,
Where the rushin’ torrent wash’d thum when the rock-wall brawk away.
Tellee about the blastin’, and the frantic climb to “grass”? (a)
Iss, sure. I’ll try to tellee ’ow the whole thing cum to pass;
Tho’ you knaw I aren’t a schollard, cause my school was Wheal Owles bal, (b)
An ’my pen was a three poun’ hammer, an’ my books some stones to spal.
Ef you look across the valley, past the crafts an’ hedges there,
You can see the ’count-house standin’ top the hillside brown an’ bare,
An’ the shaft es by the cliff, sir, where the restless ocean rolls,
An’ under the sea some levels was drove from old Wheal Owles.
Ef you went down at Botallack, or Levant p’r’aps you’ve heard tell
’Ow above your head the boulders would haive with the billows’ swell;
An’ you’d hear them gratin’, runblin’, ’bove the forty-fathom end,
An’ you’d clemb the ladders quicker than you managed to descend.
But I’m mixin’ up my story, as I fear’d I shud ’ave done,
For my head is mizzy maazy fer sence this whistness(d) ’ave begun,
An’ you wudden feel quite fitty(e) ef you met Death faace to faace,
An’ weth roarin’ drownin’ waters you ’ad a fearful chaase’
Aw, sir, I caan’t set quiet, fur the gasldy thing do stir
Every drop of blood within me, an’ I’ll tellee plainly, sir,
Tho’ they said my nerve was steady an’ head level through et all,
I dream of a Hell of water, which in thunderin’ floods do fall:
It happen’d a Tuesday mornen, this awful accident,
We were all ave us forenoon core, sir, an’ w’en from home I went
I took my crowst(f) from the missus an’ gov her a parten kiss,
An’ we knaw’d no more than the dead, sir, ’ow things wud ’ave gone amiss.
I wus haaf way down the valley w’en I found I’d come away
Thouse(g) my under-groun’ clothes—for Monday, at St. Just, es washin’ day:
So I started back in a hurry, an’ got to the cottage-door,
An’ said ef I stay’d more’n a minute I’d be late for the forenoon core.
My under-groun’ suit was ready, but my wife looked fine un queer;
An’ I says, “W’y wass the matter!” and says she, “I’ve took a fear,
For you knaw tes allus unlucky to come back when goin’ to work,”
An’ she looked as white as a witch, sir, an’ cold as that blacken’d churk.
It gave me a bit of a twingle, but I laugh’d to aise her mind,
An’ I aren’t so superstitious as some men you may find,
But the fear come back, she told me, as soon as I was gone,
An’ the fearful thing that happen’d was worse than she thought upon.
At the bal we met the cappen—I main Cappen Tom Tregear—
As straight a man as a mother cud ever have an’ rear,
An’ we got our strings ave candles an’ fuse an’ dynamite,
For to blast the ground down under, an’ to have a bit of light.
Then we all clemb’d down the ladders, about forty men, all told,
An’ up through the shaft to daylight we sung, an’ the sound uproll’d,
For we had some brae fine (h) singers from the Bible Christian choir,
An’ we like to tuney below, sir, or around a blacksmith’s fire.
We sung “In the sweet by-an-bye,” sir, ’bout the beautiful golden shore,
Where we hope we shall some day gather, an’ never to part any more;
But we never thought Death was waitin’ to beckon us over the tide,
An’ that mornen haaf ave our number wud cross to the other side!
So we clembed to the lower levels of the damp an’ slimy ground
Where the candles smoked an’ sputtered, an’ the tin an’ copper es found;
An’ we went to the stopes an’ winzes an’ ends where the lode ave ore
Es blasted an’ rulled in the waggons by miners every core.
I’ad shut one hole an’ was usin’ the hammer an’ pickers there,
When a sound like ten thousand thunders broke out through the heated air,
An’ I heard the rush an’ the roarin’, like the burstin’ of a tide,
An’ “Water! The mine is flooded! Run for your lives!” I cried.
My comrades were stunned with the horror, an’ I might ’ave stood there too,
Like a lump of lead or a statue, an’ not knaw’d what to do,
But I well remember’d the floodin’ of the next bal, old Wheal Drea,
When the water of East Boscean broke through an’ wash’d me away.
As quick as a flash of lightnin’ I hurried the men an’ boys
Into the empty waggon; an’, urged on by the noise
Of the roarin’, risin’ water that swamped the works below,
I pushed the load through the level so fast as my legs would go.
One lad fell out of the waggon, down eighteen feet to a plot
But Jim bent down as he clemb’d up, an’ the boy’s hand quickly caught,
An’ hualed(j) him up so aisy, did that fear’d excited man,
As ef but a pound of candles, or awnly a onion stran.
Then on to the shaft we rumbled, while a lad who run’d before
Shriek’d lest the waggon should crush him, as it onward madly tore,
An’ dodgin’ the rocks out-juttin’ by one candle that kept alight
In the rush of the wind, we managed to reach the shaft all right.
Up through the shaft came wailin’ the cries of the drownin’ men,
Strugglin’ in darkness with torrents that roll’d down again an’ again,
Till the gashly an’ helpless bodies sunk down like lifeless stones,
An’ the roar of the hungry water swallowed their dyin’ groans.
By the skin of their teeth some escaped, sir, by climben chains hand over hand,
An’ some, who took the wrong turning, near went to the sperrit land,
Some were haaled up by the winches, an’ some who fell off the way
Were helped again on to the ladders or would not be living to-day.
Down below is a rever of water, a mile an’ half long, for sure,
Through three mines’ deep under-ground workin’s, an’ p’r’aps a good many more,
For a pare(k) of our men was drivin an’ cut into old Wheal Drea,
Where the thousand-tons water was pressin’, an’ burst through Cargodna that day.
A blunder? Ah yes, ’twas a blunder, for our plans shawed solid ground
Where the men at the sixty-five level a hollowed-out place must have found:
You see, sir, they worked for metals in our bals in days of old,
When Solomon decked out es Temple with tin an’ with jewels an’ gold;
So we’re hedged in with scals(l) of dangers, an’ tes little enough we get
To keep body and soul together, but we aren’t the sort to fret
W’en we come up to the sunlight an’ can in our homes abide,
But ’tes hard when homes are waitin’ for bodies beneath the tide.
So that es the awful story of the floodin’ of Wheal Owles,
Thas ’ow the blinds are lowered an’ the Church-bell sadly tolls;
The mine is now a grave-yard, an’ the levels are the graves,
An’ the miners’ dust there slumbers near the wild Atlantic waves!
https://west-penwith.org.uk/owles2.htm
The following photographs of West Wheal Owles pump engine house were taken at dusk. The Cornish cliffs overlooking the Atlantic and under the quickly changing skies contain their own energies and beauty.
Page 5. : For it seemed that the idea of the Thames as a line of time as well as space was itself a shared tradition.
Had I reached back further into the literature of river argosies, I would have discovered that Conrad’s imperial stream, the rod of commercial penetration that ends in disorientation, dementia, and death, was an ancient obsession
To go upstream was, I knew, to go backward : from the metropolitan din to ancient silence; westward toward the source of the waters, the beginning of Britain in the Celtic limestone.
Page 6. : And if a child’s vision of nature can already be loaded with complicating memories, myths and meanings, how much more elaborately wrought is that through which our adult eyes survey the landscape. For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up from as much from memory as from layers of rock.
Page 7 : ….And it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.
Page 7 : ( Regarding Yosemite Natural Park ) The wilderness, after all, does not locate itself, does not name itself…….Nor could the wilderness venerate itself……It needed.hallowing visitations from New England preachers…., photographers…..painters….., and painters in prose…. To represent it as the holy park of the West.
Page 9. : Ansel Adams …..did his best to to translate his reverence into spectacular nature icons……. Explained that ….. He photographed Yosemite in the way he did to sanctify a ‘religious idea’, and ‘to inquire of my own soul just what the primeval scene really signifies…..’In the last analysis….Half Dome is just a piece of rock….There is some deep personal distillation of spirit and concept which moulds these earthly facts into some transcendental emotional and spiritual experience……unfortunately, in order to keep it pure we have to occupy it.’
Even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product.
And it is the argument of Landscape and Memory that that this is not a cause for guilt and sorrow but of celebration……So while we acknowledge ( as we must ) that the impact of humanity of the earth’s ecology has not been an unmixed blessing, neither has the relationship between nature and culture been an unrelieved and predetermined calamity
At the very least it seems right to acknowledge that it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape.
