bunn

This time, a ghostly barge-horse and bargeman.

They are walking along the Tavistock Canal, under the railway viaduct. I walked this way in early spring a couple of years ago and tried to take a picture of the white wood-anemones and yellow celandine flowers along the banks, but they didn't really show up at all in the photo, so I thought I'd try painting them. Then I added a pair of ghosts, because, as my art class says 'you always put in something weird, what is it this time???'

The canal was built in the early 19th century, to carry goods, and particularly the products of the mines, down to the Tamar River and on to Plymouth. As so often with mining projects, it ran into difficulty at the point where the builders had to drill a tunnel through some unexpectedly hard rock, and by the time the tunnel was completed, the price of the copper that it was designed to carry was already falling. It was built to have an unusually high flow rate, the idea being that this could power water wheels used by industry along the canal, creating further products for the canal-boats to carry, and also power the inclined plane rail to transport goods from the canal down to the river 72 feet below it.

The canal is still not just decorative even now. It powers a hydro-electric power station, and has done with quiet efficiency since 1933.

The railway that runs over the viaduct above was completed in 1859, and quickly killed off the canal as a working waterway. Now the railway is gone too.

I took my Scottish scene along to art class, because something about the composition bugged me and I couldn't quite work out what it was.

Colin the Art suggested moving the figures left and making them slightly larger, so that they would be outlined against the and the pier would draw the attention along to the skyline. And also that the figures should be wearing brown, not black, because that would 'bring them forward'. So I did that:
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On Wednesday I went out to lunch with my Mum, and we found a tunnel we had never visited before, which is odd, because it runs very nearly under one of our favorite cafes. It was originally built by Brunel as a railway tunnel and opened in 1859, and that's approaching the height of the mining boom, so I'm going to tag this as 'mining' on the grounds that no doubt it was the mines that made a railway up to Tavistock seem a good idea.

No railway to Tavistock any more though, so it has been left to moss, stalactites, and cyclists and walkers on the new Drake's Trail which runs into Plymouth along the old railway route. When you stand at one end, the other end seems Very Far Away. There's a good echo, too.

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We have adopted our third cat! After extremely long negotiations, she has been named Nenya. Fankil, obviously, hissed at her, despite their closeness last time they saw each other... Cats! She has retreated under the sofa for now, but she does seem like a friendly and confident girl. She's met Rosie, who behaved impeccably, and Gothmog, who was a little alarmed, but not for long.

I thought I'd run out of the most conveniently located Random Mines of the Day near my house, but I'd managed to completely miss Wheal Sheba, near Luckett.

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This Random Mine is another fairly small one, and there seems to be some confusion about it.( Read more... )

I almost fell into this mine today as I went blundering past it on a little-used path, so I thought I would resurrect my Random Mine of the Day.

This is a particularly mysterious Random Mine, because I can't find it in the Cornwall and Scilly Historic Environment Record.
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I have a bit of a cold, and Rosie Roo had rather too much of dogs last weekend, and so I have been taking it easy, and trying to walk Rosie in quiet spots where she will not encounter dogs who might wind her up. So we have not been to any mines for a bit.

However, I did go past this, so I thought I'd show you one of the chief beneficiaries of all the mining, the Duke of Bedford.

I'm not sure if you can read it, but at the bottom, it says 'Erected by Public Subscription'. Pp and I wondered about the mechanism by which a whole bunch of relatively poor miners and farmers came together and decided that the very best use for their hard-earned cash was to put it together to be used to erect a statue of an almost unimaginably wealthy and powerful man. The nineteenth century was a strange place.

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I must confess, I assumed when we wandered through this morning that this must be a later mine because there's so much preserved: lots of deep holes, still gaping alarmingly, multiple buildings still in use, that sort of thing. But it turns out that this is not due to less time passing, so much as the preservative action of the National Trust, and the absence of any other use of the valley. So, this is called Calstock Cotehele Consols mine, and this is its the chimney and associated engine house (now a holiday cottage) from the early nineteenth century.

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While I was taking photos, I must have dropped my phone from my coat pocket. Fortunately, before I had missed it, a helpful couple of people had picked it up, called me to tell me I'd lost it, driven up to our village, enquired for me at the pub, been given elaborate and confusing directions by the assorted denizens of the pub, and finally called me to confirm my location before delivering it back to me. What lovely people!

Well, the environmental person from the Dartmoor National park has been to see my Mum's sagging driveway, and appears not greatly concerned, which is good. A helpful geophysicist has offered to come with ground-penetrating radar and take a squizz at it too, which should be interesting (and much less dramatic than digging a Giant Hole to see if there is a Giant Hole underneath).

I looked in the Heritage Gateway website to find out what records there were of the shafts (see, fanfic DOES teach useful skills!) and I found that the record for the nearest documented shaft, Taylor's shaft, was empty, so I emailled to find out what the record said. Not only did they send me a copy of what the record should have said, but they also sent me this lovely map. My mum's house is roughly on the red dot. Look at all the mining bits! Tragically, it didn't say how deep Taylor's Shaft was, although the Internet thinks it was 720 feet deep!

The records only go back to 1820ish, and this mine, Devon Friendship (doesn't that sound cuddly?) goes back to at least 1740, so there could still be something undocumented under her house. But we hope if there is, it's a small, undaunting spring or something rather than a Giant Mining Hole.

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Entries tagged with mining

I paint more ghosts

Repaint, A Large Hole, A Cat.

Random Mine of the Day: Wheal Sheba

Random Mine of the Day : East Calstock, or Calstock Consols Mine

Return of Random Mine of the Day : Adit near Latcheyplain, possibly part of Wheal Benny

Mining Tycoon of the Day: Francis, 7th Duke of Bedford

Random Mine of the Day : Wheal Calstock, or Cotehele Consols, or Danescombe Mine

The Shaft II

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December 2025

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