Botallack mine is one of the most spectacular sights in European industrial heritage, its two towering engine houses hanging half way down a cliff above Atlantic waves. The site is part of the Cornish Mining World Heritage site. The nineteenth-century Cornish engine houses stand at the top of shafts that went down for 570 metres so that the mine workings could follow veins of tin, copper and arsenic under the sea bed. The earliest mining at Botallack was in about 1721. It stopped and started several times until 1914. It is a steep walk down to the two engine houses on the cliff. They have no roof but the stone walls are complete. One housed a pumping engine to stop the mine flooding, the other a winding engine to bring metalliferous ore and men up a diagonal shaft.
At the top of the cliff is an information centre that was the ‘count house’ for keeping records. Nearby are the ruins of other shafts and engine houses, a powerhouse for electricity and calcining kilns with a labyrinth for collecting arsenic.
The location is part of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site.
Botallack Mine
Botallack
TR19 7QQ St Just
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 1736 - 786934
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