Day 24: Pendeen to Land's End

Weather: Sunny with a light breeze
Distance covered today: 18.4 km (11.4 mi)
Last night's B&B: Little Pengelly
% Complete: Cumulative distance: 43.6 %:  442.6 km
Total Ascent/Total Descent: 609 m/ 615 m
GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 24(click!)


We were in the car half-way to the drop-off point. The weather was miserable; Veronica was using full fog lamps to see through the mist and the forecast was for continuing rain and high winds. I was feeling just as miserable, with a head cold the severity of which I have no words to express and I was tired after two difficult days on the trail. Veronica suddenly suggested that I take the day off….

What a revolutionary idea!

After all, in six years of long-distance walking, I have never spontaneously deviated from the plan! Neither illness nor injury has been any excuse. Now though, the circumstances are very different. We are staying in the same place for all of my walks around the end of the peninsula, so accommodation arrangements aren’t an issue, nor is baggage transfer. I had also allowed myself a spare day at the end of the trip for rest and recuperation, so why not use that day now when the weather was bad and I was feeling sick and tired? Much to Veronica’s amazement, I agreed. She turned the car around, dropped me at the B&B to mope about in solitude and went about her business in the higher, esoteric world of beautiful gardens and artworks of which we Neanderthals understand little.

It was a splendid Idea! I dosed myself, resisted the whiskey bottle, went to sleep and when I awoke I watched grand stuff on the internet. Essentially I rejuvenated! By this morning I was rearing to go and off I went like a spring hare with a point to prove!

And what a fascinating day it was! For a start the going was easier, but much more interestingly, I was moving through some of the most historically relevant areas of the Cornish mining industry. Early in the walk I passed Geevor Mine, which closed down as recently as 1990. From the coast path it looked like an operational complex, but in fact it is being run by a few retired miners as a heritage museum, complete with underground tours. The bulk of the miners have apparently emigrated. A little further along the coast and connected to Geevor is the Beam Engine at Levant Mine. It is the last surviving steam engine in Cornwall, operated for tourists by the National Trust. Originally these high pressure steam engines were used to pump water out of the mines, and also to move men and materials. Again, tours are available but time didn’t allow.

I was though, fascinated to discover something of the finances of the mining industry. Apparently, investors were called "adventurers". For instance for the Levant Mine, in 1820 twenty adventurers paid a sum of £20 each for a share (£400 in total, around £35,000 today). They could be called upon to invest more, but in the case of Levant that proved unnecessary. In 1821, a rich copper lode was cut and the company started to pay dividends. Over the next twenty years, these amounted to £12,500 per share. Every two months a shareholders meeting was held which involved a really good dinner with ale, wine and spirits. It was said that some investors bought shares just so they could attend the dinners!

More hauntingly, one of the chimneys near Levant still displays a blackened rim which was the effect of the arsenic works below. Arsenic was produced as a by-product of calcining tin concentrates to drive off impurities. Men and boys scraped off the greyish-white arsenic crystals by hand on the inside of these chimneys and in the 50 years from 1854, Levant Mine alone produced nearly 5,000 tons of crude arsenic. Arsenic was used for dying clothes, making lead shot, coloured wallpaper and as medicine and pesticide. The men working these mines received almost no protective clothing other than cotton-wool nose- plugs, handkerchiefs and clay rubbed into exposed skin.

Further down the coast I almost missed what is apparently one of the most photographed relics of the Cornish mining industry at Botallack. I was talking to a group of walkers from North Carolina and if their leader hadn’t called my attention to it, I would have missed it. I was able to regain my poise by explaining to the group that the inclined shafts from this mine angled out beneath the sea and in storms the miners could hear boulders on the sea bed moving about under the influence of the waves. Ultimately the sea broke into the workings.

A little further down the coast, I reached Cape Cornwall. Until the first Ordnance Survey 200 years ago, this was believed to be the most westerly point of the UK, with a monument to celebrate the fact, but the OS of course then decreed that Land’s End deserves that dubious accolade. I say dubious, because Land’s End has, if anything, descended further as a tasteless commercial emporium since I was last there six years ago. No doubt it serves the trippers needs and they certainly flock to it. I had hoped to meet Veronica there in a glorious re-enactment of my departure for John O’Groats from there six years ago.

As it happened we met, had a Cornish ice-cream and went back to the B&B. The most I can say is that on the famous milepost, the distance to John O’Groats is still the same; 874 miles, some 328 miles less than it took me to reach the same goal, by my devious path.

Despite the tat, I couldn’t help feeling real nostalgia. I don’t think I will ever forget how challenged I felt on that morning, wondering why I was embarking on such a useless enterprise, and whether I had any chance of succeeding.

Well, I did, and it was worth it…..

The Lighthouse at Pendeen Watch

Geevor Mine: closed as recently as 1990

Multi-coloured ore stains on the rocks

The early workings at Geevor and Levant Mines

The blackened chimney of the arsenic recovery plant

The Bean Engine at Levant Mine

Back to the cliffs! 

The engine houses at the inclined Crowns Shafts at Botallack. These shafts went under the sea

Industrial archaeology everywhere

Cape Cornwall

A donkey for Veronica! 

Land's End in the distance

Steep cliffs with mine shafts everywhere. Care needed!

Even steeper cliffs!

How to get across this lot? Patience and care...

At last a beach! In fact the last beach on the North Coast at Sennen Cove 

Land's End lighthouse

The Land's End commercial complex on the hill

King Arthur and Shaun the Sheep........

A reunion!