HEW, PRONOUNCED, YOU
It’s Hew, pronounced, You, he tells me as I shake his hand. He’s just appeared from among massive lumps of rusting mining machinery on a patch of waste ground below the Tin Mill at King Edward Mine Museum (KEM); it’s one of those organised scrapyards from which you know stuff will be reborn through sandblasting and intimacy with the inner-life of engines—an intimacy I’ve never known. Men and their engines, I want to chuckle. But there is something about these mining-related machines: their immovable mass; the foundry marks from long-since bulldozed sites; their functionality made mysterious by their semi-dismantled state. These were valuable and often transported at great expense between one site and another as mines closed and reopened. I can’t help but liking the idea of them returning from seized gears and pistons back into hot, fluent motion—forgetting, for a moment, the clouds of diesel smoke and the functions they performed.
Hugh is wearing a red boiler suite. I introduce myself, and, to my surprise, he says: I’ve wanted to meet you; I read about your plans in the Western Morning News. The first I’d heard about the article was from mum over breakfast—somebody from chapel had spotted my name and given her the clipping. As another big squall darkens the sky behind the ruins of an old engine house, Hugh starts to tell me things I could only have dreamt of hearing at the start of the project. I want to stop him so I can get my pen out and make notes, but my pen’s in the car. But what he tells me is unforgettable: he used to run wild in Tehidy woods with a pack of Alsatian dogs—his mother was Matron there when it was the old isolation hospital; he’s fished all the ponds within cycling distance of the river; he knows about the bear that was kept in a ‘zoo’ up the valley; he thinks he’s seen sea trout in the Tehidy branch of the river. I point to the small flood plane below the museum where someone’s bulldozing irregularities in the landscape into a massive berm of earth. Hugh tells me they used to call the area ‘the sands’, because of the river sand just under the surface of the soil. The ground is being cleared and levelled for glamping pods. This isn’t a problem for Hugh: land has always been reclaimed from mining sites to make farms and settlements. You can’t help but have to do it around here, he says. Hugh is great: there’s no sense that writing a poem about the Red River might be stupid thing to do. He’s wants to share his knowledge of the river he’s grown up beside, and the Cornish culture he’s contributed to. He tells me I shouldn’t just be writing about the Red River, but the Red River and its tributaries—Tehidy is at the source of one of those tributaries, and should be included.
Later he will tell me that when they were building the Camborne-Redruth bypass in the early 1970s (a road which severs the Red River in two), the police thought they’d find a few old cars down mine shafts in the area, but, in fact, found upwards of a hundred. I’d known people dumped stuff down them, and I’d thrown a few big stones down uncapped shafts around where I lived to here them click-clack down into silence. But a carpark’s worth of cars? The shafts around Tolvaddon must be like vertical dumps, poisoned wells, ritual shafts connecting us with the gods of our own indifference. No one cared much about the place back then. It was, to the cursory eye, a wasteland: the earth cut, holed, excavated and stripped back to its raw, mineral bones—a place ripe for fly-tipping. You couldn’t really call it vandalism, it was simply the public continuation of private industry’s dumping of stuff when the mines closed. These ruins were exciting to play around, too: like moving amongst the work of giants; and all of it was there for children to play on and wonder over. It was a place to disappear for the day; a place to make rubbish disappear; a place to watch out you didn’t make yourself disappear, for good, down a hole. Other than that, you did what you could get away with. They still do: the Red River valley is still a magnet for fly-tippers.
After shivering for ten minutes, not wanting to stop him, I have to interrupt his flow to get my coat as the squall comes on. We go off to meet Dave and the rest of the volunteers at KEM in the old Camborne School of Mines teaching room and Survey Office. The room feels like a cross between a Methodist Sunday-school and a scout hut: lots of lovely dark-varnished pitch pine, chamfered edges, old benches, and with hard hats and maps and minerals and papers scattered around on hooks and shelves. The chipped paintwork of the doors tells records the physical history of the many people who have passed through this room, taking with them, around the globe, techniques that have turned rivers red, and extracted riches for shareholders and the metals we depend on: we’re all implicated in the holes they’ve made in the ground. As the hail clatters down on the roof of the shed and the museum volunteers hand round mince pies and hot tea—it’s a maintenance day and the site isn’t open to the public until spring next year—I get the feeling that this will be an important place for the project: they, like Hugh, are interested in the idea of a poem about the Red River, of someone caring about their work. They tell me there’s even a Red River choir! I have my notebook open all the time to their generous, warming conversation.
Once introductions are over, Dave, one of the trustees, gives me a tour of the museum. There’s so much to see. In the Tin Mill they’ve gathered and preserved all the equipment used to separate the tin from the tin ore or ‘cassiterite’. The Californian Stamps, or stone crushers, are at one end of the process (all heavy iron and power), and at the other, the Rag Frames used to recover tin minerals from the mine tailings. The Rag Frames catch my attention for their combination of aesthetic beauty and functionality. They were built from memory by Willie Uren, a former tin-mill foreman, because, being made of wood, all the originals had rotted away—a bit like reciting a poem from memory, I think. They were developed in the 1860s at the Cook’s Kitchen Mine down the valley at Tuckingmill, using water from the Red River to recover, through a form of panning, the tin that had escaped initial processing. Hugh can sense my interest and turns on the water supply to the Frame. First a funnel-shaped iron-plate cistern begins to hiss and fill; and then, after a minute or two, water spills into a long wooden runnel and spouts through holes drilled on either side along its length. The amount of water involved is on a human scale: the water pouring from the holes is the amount you’d get from a watering can without a rose, or maybe a very large teapot. The wooden hoppers, filled by the spouting water, over balance, and sluice their contents out across wooden tables in a quiet, meditative rhythm. It’s like something one might find in a Zen water garden. This is water beautifully organised; water made instrumental and yet rich in metaphor; water divided and subdivided into its smallest useful units for the extraction of tin. But I’m seeing the Rag Frame at an aestheticising distance, stripped of its original function. When it was working, the water would have been an impure, rusty red. Back in the heyday of mining in the valley, all the water in the river’s course would flow through the Rag Frames during the summer: this intricate wooden sorting machine divided the river like an electric current in order to drive a water computer (of sorts), switched on and off in a binary code dictated by the flow of water.
The other thing that catches my eye is the 3-D underground map, dating from the 1970s, of mines associated with the KEM/South Crofty area. It’s made out of clear and coloured perspex, and suspended in a free-standing glass cabinet. I’ve seen one of these before at Geevor Tin Mine, but, while this is smaller, it’s no less astonishing for the careful calculation of the position of hollow dark spaces in solid granite implied in the strips of perspex that mark the various shafts, levels and stopes. How they plotted it, without being able to triangulate from known points, is beyond me. It reminds me of a Naum Gabo sculpture; but the 3-D map is not the ideal resolution of sculptural tensions in an energised, harmonious form, but a practical piece of thinking expressed in a way, and with materials, that makes it possible to conceive of relative positions underground while above it, and perhaps even when below. The white-painted room fills with light in one of those odd co-incidences of thought and occurrence I would love to take as a sign. Then I realise, as I reflect on these two ‘beautiful’ things, I could equally see this beautiful perspex construction as like any other map used to control space and strip out a resource from a landscape; or, even, as the miniature cast of the human parasite that his riddled its way through the crystalline brain of the land.
If you want to visit or to find out more about King Edward Mine Museum go to their excellent website.
