Come take a walk back in time with me……use this photograph and understand that the spot on which I stood and shot this image was the “perfect mash of copper-coloured mud” where men, women and children toiled……

…….continued to ascend, proceeding along the tramway leading to the Caradon Mine. Soon the scene presented another abrupt and extraordinary change. We had been walking hitherto amid almost invariable silence and solitude; but now, with each succeeding minute, strange, mingled, unintermitting (sic) noises began to grow louder and louder around us. We followed a sharp curve in the tramway and immediately found ourselves saluted by an entirely new prospect, and surrounded by an utterly bewildering noise. All about us monstrous wheels were clanking and groaning in the hoarsest discords; invisible waters were pouring onward with a rushing sound; high above our heads, on skeleton platforms, iron chains clattered fast and fiercely on iron pulleys, and huge steam pumps puffed and gasped, and slowly raised their heavy black beams of wood. Far beneath the embankment on which we stood, men, women and children were breaking and washing ore in a perfect mash of copper-coloured mud and copper-coloured water. We had penetrated to the very centre of the noise, the bustle and the population of a great mine. (Wilkie Collins 1850)

Surely there can be no better description of what it was like to walk into the mine for the first time? Imagine what it was like to be walking into that chaotic, hostile scene as a child on your first day at work in the mine?

When I first read the passage that Wilkie Collins wrote, I shuddered. The magnificent scenery, the crumbling buildings that these days look so benign and romantic, all of it belies the brutal past of this place. The place where the average life expectancy of a man was 33 years of age and life was probably as hard as we (in the UK) have ever known it.

We pass through this space regularly, it’s in the Seaton Valley and is Caradon Mine’s Dressing Floor. You can still see parts of the floor with their cobbles peeping out from among the grass and gorse. Since I read Collins’s account of his impressions of the place, I can’t help but feel respect for its history and a deep respect for the folks who toiled here.

We’ve been in the valley tonight while walking to the pub and I’m still glad I was born now and not 100 years before.

Wilkie Collins is, by the way, one of our great Victorian novelists for anyone out there who has not come across the name before.