The Tour

The Tour ROBIN MACKAY: This field trip came about as something of an accident: It was, if I’m not mistaken, around five hundred million years ago when the material that would become Earth, having detached itself from the sun, underwent something of a crisis, producing the differentiated planet we know and love, forming the hard crust upon which all of our diverse activities unfold, and which protects us from the inner fire. This moment is recognized by the discipline of geotraumatics as a primal scene whose repressed memories can be divined from the enigmatic yet evidently pained planetary countenance. All of the processes described by geology can be traced either to the influence of the sun—the climatic processes that alternately irritate and sooth the surface of the earth, or that of its repressed runt sibling—the inner sun, the molten core of the earth, trapped beneath yet constantly liable to resurface rudely and protest against its entrapment—only to solidify and crust over once again; the plutonic, or deep earth, processes. What we know of the earth’s formation through this deep astrophysical history has put an end to the great debate that raged at the dawn of geology, that between the neptunists, who insisted that geological phenomena owed solely to the influence of climate and catastrophic floods; and the plutonists, who argued that they found their origin in the great subcrustal abyss. However, we should not believe that Pluto has entirely vanquished his watery foe. For both the climatic processes driven by the sun and the plutonic processes driven by the core of the earth, are lubricated, so to speak, by water. From this, geotraumatics draws the conclusion that all that moves upon the face of the earth, from the lowest forms of life to the highest forms of human thought, are all expressions of what is known as the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy—that is, the strange complicity between water and the burning core of the earth. The validity of this thesis being granted, the special status afforded to so-called Kernovian Syndrome by certain scholars remains disputed, and is a source of no little tension among geophilosophers, as we saw with the infamous disruption of the twelfth international congress of

neoplutonists in 1979 in Moscow. In any case it’s certainly true that in the region we are about to explore, we find some exquisitely perplexing, even extravagant, developments of the cosmically ancient bond between water and the plutonic depths, and as we shall see, the mining industry brought with it manifold peripheral and associated activities all of which boasted watery rapports of one kind or another. But who are we to assess the heady claim that humans, through their actions on or below the surface, merely relay or exacerbate this cosmic drama; that, seduced by the mineral riches of the earth, themselves the product of H2O and magma, they become an active agent in the already vexed relations between water and the infernal depths? Happily we have with us today some experts who will help unfold this drama. Shaun Lewin is a transversal ecologist; James Strongman is a geologist and petrologist of great renown in these parts; and Dr Iain Hamilton Grant a speculative physicist and expert on geotraumatics, having, like myself, studied with professor Daniel Barker in the years before his…unfortunate exit. Kenna Hernly supervises Urbanomic’s Hydroplutonic Archive and the Spryling Bequest. And Paul Chaney you’ll know as a prominent neoagrosophist and Field Club revivalist. Therefore you will have the opportunity to judge for yourselves today the value of this extravagant hypothesis which brings together in an artful if undisciplined manner the resources of geology, mineralogy, philosophy, and exonomics—and to decide whether Cornwall deserves that dubious accolade which Professor Marvin Talisker bestows upon it when he writes that for geotraumatics, Kernovian Syndrome marks the point at which the earth’s endlessly frustrated quest to belch up its internal solar trauma devises its most devious tactic yet: opening up its glittering depths, it beckons to what will become its most glorious instrument yet: those humans who will become the first life form ever to enter geological time in advance of their own extinction. I am going to ask Ms Hernly now to distribute the Fault-Map we have prepared especially for this occasion and which I am sure will help you to locate and orient yourself during the tour. Subsequently we will depart for our first destination. Please fasten your seatbelts.

*** JAMES STRONGMAN: It’s going to be an exciting trip. We’re going to be looking around the mineralisation of the Carnmenellis and Carn Marth batholiths, part of the Cornubian batholith which underlies the whole of Cornwall and parts of North Devon, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, and Lands End, and we’ll see how fluids and fluid processes are crucial to the mineralisation associated with the Cornish granite. It’s probably best to start with a bit of context about how the granite is formed. Basically, we need to go back about four hundred million years to a time when where we are now would probably have been around the equator; there would have been no Atlantic Ocean; we’d have been on a palaeocontinent known as Avalonia, and that would have been colliding into another continent called Baltica (you can imagine where Baltica is now). There was a sea called Iapetus, and this sea was between Avalonia and a much bigger continent known as Laurentia, which you may have heard of before. A lot of sediment had been deposited in Laurentia, and that would be the source of the later mineralisation. And this is where our metals will be sourced, and more importantly, along with them, some of the fluids that will be crucial to the transportation and deposition of these metals. As Iapetus starts to close up, about three hundred million years ago, Baltica and Avalonia collide progressively with Laurentia. During this collision you get uplift, and lots of faults; you can actually see these faults today, and they are very important to some of the hydrogeology of the area. As this collision takes place, the crust gets thicker and thicker, and it heats up and we get melting, and this is where the granites come in. The intrusion of granite into sedimentary rock and its slow cooling is the engine behind mineralisation. As the granitic magma heats and assimilates the rocks it’s intruding into, it also releases fluids that are driven through the surrounding rocks into which the granite is intruding, and as these fluids circulate they scavenge the metals, leaching them out of the rocks. The composition of the fluids is quite particular to Cornwall, because the rocks they’re going through are very rich in one element, boron, which we see in a mineral called tourmaline. Boron, which is actually a very stable element, is crucial for scavenging tin, because when

you have very high boron, the concentrations in your fluid can dissolve tin. This area is richer in copper than tin, though, and copper is scavenged by chlorine. Rocks that have been deposited in an ocean are very rich in chlorine, and therefore we have very chlorine-rich fluids. So as these fluids move through the rocks, they scavenge and build up a store of metals, resulting in a reservoir of metal-rich fluid. As the granite gets nearer and nearer to the surface, the fluids become more and more concentrated, because the thing that’s keeping the metals in suspension is getting reduced because it’s turning into a mineral. All of these fluids are under a lot of pressure, so they’re looking for weaknesses, and some of the weaknesses they find are some of the old faults from the earlier, mountainbuilding phases. The fluids exploit these faults, and as they move into the fractures, the pressure drops, so the solubility of the metal decreases and the metal starts to precipitate into these fractures, which is what creates the metal veins. We’ll see some of these fractures, and hopefully we’ll see some of the mineralisation, although a lot of it has already been mined out and is long gone now. Obviously, after the metals were deposited, there was a later phase of enrichment, and this is where weather processes come in. In the first stage, chlorine-rich sea water was involved, and now it’s rain and river water. The important thing about cassiterite is that tin is a very stable element. In the form of tin oxide it’s very dense, its density’s six times greater than water, it has a hardness comparable to or slightly harder than quartz—so it’s as hard as all the things around it, and much heavier. When it gets into a stream, then, it will tend to always sink to the bottom. Which means that anywhere where there’s a depression or a river, the tin will always fall out, whereas other, lighter minerals will get washed away, washed into the sea. Over thousands of years, therefore, this process produces beds which are very rich in tin. These weather processes enrich the tin, which is where Cornish mining began: on the rivers and the alluvial systems. This slow build-up of enriched metal in the riverbeds is lying in wait there to become the target of industry, so this is the first invitation, if you will, for our entanglement in the hydroplutonic plot.

RM: A new breed of scavengers now enter onto the scene, sifting tin from the stream, consolidating and concentrating it. Humans are already becoming implicated in the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy; but of course, their involvement accelerates when, seduced by what may lie beneath the surface, they can no longer rely on climatic processes, and begin to move into the depths of the earth in search of deeper veins. The thirst for metal that these first tantalising deposits unlocked is what will drive the development of the steam engine, which will enable miners to be dragged ever further into the bowels of the earth…. But as we’ll see in our first location, having long ago assisted in depositng the metals, well before the deployment of steam, water was also exploited as an energy source in their extraction.

1. Kennall Vale: Hydraulic Capitalism Stithians Parish is intersected by the Kennall River, which descends from the granite heights of Stithians through Kennall Vale through Ponsanooth and Perranarworthal, a river whose outlet to the sea we will see later at Devoran, and which was used at Perran Foundry as an energy-source for smelting. Indeed, within the roughly fifteen square miles of the river and its tributaries, its hydraulic resources were heavily employed. We know as early as 1659 of a blowing house in Kennall Vale for smelting tin, with a water wheel to power bellows, and leats, and in a text from 1824 we read: This river from its source to its union runs about five and a half miles, in which short distance it turns thirty-nine water wheels all in active and full employ. It may be doubted, if with the same short distance another such stream can be found in England. The old settlement of Ponsanooth (the Stag Inn was once a hunting lodge for Saxon gentry) was thus a most prosperous place during the pre-industrial mining period because of its dual asset of being near to a sea port (Devoran and Perranarworthal) and having access to this natural source of energy, which was exploited in the many subordinate industries that grew up around mining. And here we are at one of the few remaining sites where this energy supply was exploited to produce gunpowder to loosen the precious ore from its rocky matrix. The gunpowder mills at Kennall Vale were founded in the early nineteenth century by Ben Sampson of Gwennap Churchtown. The works contained a dozen wheels and employed around sixty men at its height. Established between 1812 and 1820, the mills expanded rapidly from 1820 to 1844, with a doubling of the works, and expansion into the adjoining Roches Wood in 1844. An on-site saltpetre refinery was added in 1850, only for the works to fall into rapid decline at end of nineteenth century. They were closed in 1910. The most notable of the remaining buildings are the seven conjoined pairs of incorporating mills, with their wheel pits fed by stone-lined leats. These leats should be noted as a particular

manifestation of the prominence of ‘hydraulic capitalism’ in industrial Cornwall: the waters of the river were routed and rerouted to be used many times by the multiple waterwheels. This use of gravity as natural capital, through the medium of water, seems a clear indication of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy at work. We can also find here some remains of what were once thirty associated structures: offices, carpenters shops, cooperage, packing house, timber shed, sawmills, manager’s house, and so on. The complexity of the process of producing gunpowder can be appreciated by these many structures: Grinding charcoal and sulphur; refining of saltpetre; mixing in rotating wooden barrels in the mixing house to make ‘green charge’; and thence to the incorporating mills to be stone-ground; pressed into cakes in the ‘press house’; broken up in the ‘breaking-down’ or ‘corning house’; dried in the ‘gloom stove’, the dust removed in the ‘dusting house’, graphite added in the ‘glazing mill’, and finally to the ‘packing house’. The remains of these facilities are set in what is now a nature reserve—rather ironically, since most of its trees were planted for the express purpose of buffering the outside from potential explosions. And indeed Kennall Vale was the site of many a celebrated accident: Local legend has it that one explosion decapitated a worker, whose head landed and was later discovered a mile away. This appears to be a conflation of several verifiable accidents, since in the Royal Cornwall Gazette of Feb 25 1826 we read: A melancholy accident occurred at the powder mills near Ponsanooth on Friday last. About half past twelve o clock, on that day, the mixing house, in which were four persons at their usual employment, was blown up. Two of the men escaped without injury, but the woman, named Rutter, died on Friday night. The third man named Weeks, survived until Sunday morning. Although it is generally difficult to account for accidents in powder mills, the present was occasioned by the old woman who had been roasting potatoes at a considerable distance from the works, and had unconsciously carried a spark of fire on her clothes to the mill. This was seen immediately on her entrance, but before it could be prevented, it fell, and the explosion instantly followed. Corroborating the mileage, the West Briton of 18 May 1838 reports: Five mills blew up in succession, and part of a roof was found a mile from the premises.

And, substantiating the tale of a violent decapitation, in the West Briton of 15 Jan 1851: On Saturday last, an inquest was held at Ponsanooth, before J. Carlyon esq., Coroner, on the body, or to speak more correctly, the fragments of the body (for the poor fellow was literally blown to pieces) of John Martin. From the evidence, it appeared that the deceased […] was engaged in removing some powder from the glossing mill [when] the mill was blown up in the air with a tremendous explosion, which was heard for many miles around, and shook the houses a considerable distance off. The head of the deceased was discovered about a quarter of a mile from the spot, and other parts were afterward collected from different places. Verdict, accidental death. SHAUN LEWIN: So we’re standing here in a beautiful forest. How old is it? Perhaps two hundred years at most. Often when we stand in these sorts of places we’re transported into some sort of romantic idea of what nature could be, should be. In fact, this is a postindustrial landscape akin to a car park or a quarry: this is a postmetal forest. I’m going to start off by making a salvo of generalisations about how organisms exist, and then go on to elucidate how transversal ecology makes use of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy to bring into solution discrete entities: economics, plant growth…, and then from that solution precipitate out some crystals that maybe can lead us into an understanding of humans’ interaction with the soil, with the air, and with the core of the planet. There are two primary interactions of organisms with their environment. Firstly, everything that’s alive is engaged in the modulation of rates: we’re attempting to speed things up. I say ‘we’ in the broadest sense—I’m speaking for myself as a human being, but also for a locust, also for this sycamore tree, for all of us…. So for example this tree is slowing down the rate at which nitrogen is released into the atmosphere by locking it into its wood. It’s also drawing carbon dioxide into itself via its leaves, taking it out of the atmosphere at a far higher rate than would be happening in its absence. This whole process, all of these accelerations and decelerations, have to use energy somewhere. Plants, being nonhuman, tend to use a solar source: they consume the energy from the sun, destroy it, burn it off, and transfer it into matter. Equally within my own body, I am taking energy from…well…in a

fundamental sense, still from the sun, but also I’m taking energy from economic actions and increasing the range of calcium accumulation within my body. This is only one half of the actions that we living organisms engage in. This modulation of rates presupposes that we are selecting things for our environment that we’re more interested in. For example, this tree, by its sheer existence, is shading out the ground beneath it, preventing anything from growing there unless it can handle low sunlight. This tree therefore has created a new environment around it. As with a tree, so with the mining activity that took place in this area. Humans came to this area and made use of the flux of water as a source of energy, and they transferred that energy into structures—firstly into the tangible structures we can see around us, into these buildings, but also a more pervasive and intangible structure which I call the business of trading, and of manipulating the environment to create something new and valuable to them. Actually, much of the forest that we see around us isn’t some sort of endogenous response to the soil conditions and the light conditions or even to the availability of seeds in the area. It’s actually a deliberate attempt to make this whole area into some sort of green blast-chamber to prevent explosions from travelling too far in any direction. Of course the most interesting thing about we humans is that we have really taken this whole process of habitat manipulation and rate modification as far as it can possibly go. So, superimposed on factors as blind as the chemical weathering of rocks and the cycling of nitrogen within the soil, we’ve also, through a process of accelerated erosion, taken metals from beneath the surface of the planet and released them into an economic flux which would have first started in maybe the Bronze Age when people in the Middle East recognised that their existing copper supplies would make much better weapons if they could mix them with the tin that was extracted from the rivers here. This process then became accelerated through the transfer of value, so that what initially would have been a relatively passive process of sifting and selection of things from the environment, ore from the environment which was useful to the endogenous human population, then became

accelerated gradually through the use of available energy sources— water power, for example—and it became possible to bring more and more of this material to the surface, to send more and more of this material to the economic centres of the Bronze Age, which would be Mesopotamia, I guess, and the Mediterranean. Finally, with the conceptual leaps that make mankind so powerful on this planet, we transferred our energy sources from water, from things that occur in the environment, through to chemical materials, such as gunpowder, which again accelerated the rate at which materials were released from the subterranean mass of this area. With this acceleration, given the principle of the conservation of energy, there has to be a deceleration somewhere. And this is the net effect of human actions here: we have decelerated the rates of the natural accumulation of matter. This forest, if it had been unperturbed, would have been a temperate rainforest analogous to what we find in Western Canada: a colder version of the Amazon, effectively. However, through the release of materials into the soil, and the constant disruption caused by human activity, we’ve kept it at a level which I would say is equivalent to the forest that would first emerge after the retreat of a glacier. Or alternatively, and more appropriately considering the formation of this area, what we see here are the sorts of plants that we’d expect to see as green life returned to the slopes of a volcano following its eruption. As humans, we want to try and arrest this process, because we always want to derive more energy from the environment and deny that which the forest would take for itself. So, for example, the area surrounding this would probably be engaged in some sort of agricultural production which would be, I would say, the maintenance of an artificial grass ecosystem. Something that would normally be found on the retreat of a glacier, as the tundra started to vegetate, or indeed at the birthplace of mankind on the savannah of Africa. Interestingly though, with the introduction of the potentials that had been liberated by the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, we have no need anymore for reliance on the sun as source of primary production: the ability of the sun to grow plants is irrelevant, we’ve actually got a better source of value here, which is the metal that we can get out of the ground. The consequence of this is that there’s no real interest in

maintaining a viable soil structure here, or a healthy plant community, so we can allow toxins to build up in the surface. Later on we’ll be seeing an arsenic works which has had similar effects, and I’m sure that around here the soils are completely useless to agriculture, partly for topographic reasons, because it’s hard to work them, but also owing to the scattering of contaminants, gunpowder byproducts, and the sheer amount of felling and destruction that must have gone on here. Elsewhere, we would have seen a gridding of the land surface, a separation of the fields into a stratified organisation, a matrix of land ownership. Here, however, owing to the eruption of metal-rich materials, there was no requirement to engage with this sort of division of solar resources. Instead, there is an activity more akin to some sort of hunter-gathering, a scavenging, the pursuit of a prey through a three-dimensional medium, which in this case turns out to be the sub-crust. Interestingly, the only other thing that’s like this in the area is fishing, another activity in which effectively the watery bodies of the earth have been exploited for their riches. It’s now a nature reserve. That’s because this area has low value to economic production and, I would assume, like many other contaminated sites in Britain, has very little attraction to developers —personally I wouldn’t want to build a house on some sort of mineral toxic spoil. Sites like these generally fall out of use, and they develop a sort of negative value in terms of property development. As the economic flux that drove the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy in this area ebbs to a halt, as the potential difference between tin production here and bronze production elsewhere starts to level out, there is less and less interest in the use of these areas for mineral extraction. Gradually, maybe through some enhancing of global consciousness, perhaps simply through some sort of realpolitik, it becomes easier to designate these areas as nature reserves, and thereby endow them with some sort of surplus value which is still congruent with the conditions that we find here. Critically, it’s a way of using this land without actually spending too much money redeveloping it, once the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy has passed through.

2. Perran Wharf and Foundry: Bringing the Port to the Mine During the eighteenth century Perranarworthal, just outside Falmouth, was developed into the first major port serving the nascent mining industry in the Gwennap area. The Foxes of Falmouth were a wealthy Quaker family who had settled in Cornwall, having come from Wiltshire in the seventeenth century, initially at St Germans. As Quakers they were excluded from pursuing professional careers, consequently became very rich through commerce, and latterly made important contributions to science and natural philosophy. George Croker Fox was already established as a successful shipping agent and merchant in Fowey. He came to Falmouth in 1759 and George Croker Fox and Company began business as consuls, shipping agents, and ship owners. In 1769 Fox took out a 99-year lease on what were at the time wastelands, where the old mediaeval estate of Anworthal had been. He subsequently developed Perran Creek in Kennall Vale into Perran Wharf, an industrial and commercial complex that served the rapidly-growing tin and copper industries of the area (from 1800–1850 Cornish copper production was worth over £13 million, a phenomenal amount for the period—the equivalent of around £7 billion in today’s money). Fox’s idea was to ‘bring the port to the mine’ rather than, as was previously the case, having to use pack mules to carry coal and timber across uneven and steep terrain to the mine sites. His sons George Croker Fox Jnr (1752–1807) and Robert Weir Fox I (1754– 1818) carried on the business after him. Fox was evidently one of the first to realise that there was much money to be made out of the peripheral industries around mining. As early as 1775, there are records of exports via Perran Wharf of copper, and imports of coal and timber—and also guano. PAUL CHANEY: Guano. It’s shit. Bat and seagull and seal shit, mined off the coasts of Peru and brought around the Cape and all the way here to be used in all sorts of industrial processes, basically as a

source of nitrogen—concentrated nitrogen that could then be combined with other chemicals and processed into what we actually need for gunpowder, which is potassium nitrate. So the guano unloaded here would have gone to the gunpowder works at Kennall Vale. The other half of the recipe is wood ash: they used to bring it here and probably left it in huge great big stinking pits to fester and stew and purify and strengthen, quite a mucky business. ROBIN MACKAY: Opposite us, we see the famous Perran Foundry, which opened in 1791, making heavy castings for the beam engines that drew water from Cornwall’s mines. We’ll talk more about the engines later, but for now, note that the number one problem once the mines began to go deeper was getting rid of the underground water. When you see the emblematic Cornish engine house, that’s what most of them were used for, drawing up the water using beam engines. In 1840 Perran Foundry built a famous 85-inch engine for Taylor’s Shaft at United Mines. in 1842 which achieved a ‘duty’ of 107 million (107 million pounds of water raised 1 ft by 1 bushel of coal). These were big machines. The foundry was established by the Fox family and also manufactured parts for the Redruth-Chacewater Railway, which was used to transport ore down to Perran Wharf. So there was a massive complex here of leats, foundry buildings, stores, facilities for transport; by 1860 it was a six-acre site employing 400 men, and it remained in operation until 1849. Perran Foundry drew its energy from the Kennall River, which er already saw running through the gunpowder works. The lords of the manor of Arworthal—which became Perranarworthal later—had used the Kennall River in mediaeval times for the manorial mill. As we’ve already seen, it was not the only industrial enterprise that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continued to draw on this source of power which flows from the Stithians Reservoir and flows out into the creek here at Perranarworthal. The foundry was also important in the development of the steam engine and the furtherance of Cornish engineering knowledge. When the aforementioned enlightened George Weir Fox II was in charge, the workers were invited to discuss their suggestions for improvements of the machinery, and it was as an extension of her

meetings with the engineers that George Weir’s daughter Anna Maria Fox formed the Cornwall Polytechnic Society, which was bestowed Royal Patronage by William IV in 1835, and played a major role in industrial development throughout the nineteenth century. We’re going to stop briefly at the Norway Inn. Extant since the early nineteenth century, when this road was opened as a turnpike, it takes its name from the Norwegian Ships that brought in the timbers for lining mineshafts and tunnels, at Perran Wharf. At that time the river, which, as we can see across the road from the Norway Inn, is now marshland, was far deeper, and it was even possible for small sailing vessels to discharge upstream from the Inn. At high tide, timber was floated up from the large ships docked at Restronguet Creek and stored in specially constructed timber pits. As our driver is pointing out to us, there was a system of these pits—still visible as marshy areas to the south of the canal cut—where the timber was left in the salt water so it would then have a longer life in the fresh water underground in the mines. PC: Perran Foundry built some of the largest industrial machines of their age, really: the one Robin mentioned, the 85-inch pumping engine—you’re talking about a piston that’s about seven feet across, a piston as big as this bus. Currently the Wharf building is falling to bits and has been under development as a chic housing complex for years, stalled by some strange quango between planning officers…. But the Fox company which developed the site had an even more expansive empire, reaching out along the supply route into South Wales, where they bought up iron ore mines and smelting works and factories. RM: There is speculation among geophilosophers that the Fox family were able to capitalise upon some prior knowledge of the importance of Kernovian Syndrome and its link to the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy. At least, we know that G. Croker Fox’s grandson Robert Weir Fox II (1789–1877, buried at the Quaker Burial Ground at Budock), who lived at Rosehill (now Falmouth Art School on Wood Lane) was a very early contributor to geophysics, the first scientist to investigate

hydrothermal mineralisation. He was a Cornish ‘natural philosopher’ whose research into the internal temperature of the earth—having spent forty years from 1815–1855 observing the temperature in the Gwennap mines—proved for the first time that temperature increased with depth, and led him to hypothesise a source of emanative heat at the core of the planet. This work is detailed in his papers for the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall ‘On the Temperature of Mines’ (1822) and ‘Some Further Observations on the Temperature of Mines’ (1827), and (in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal) ‘Some Remarks on the High Temperatures in the United Mines’ (1847); not to mention his ‘Report on the Temperature of Some Deep Mines in Cornwall’ for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1858). The first of these papers opens as follows: I believe most persons acquainted with mines are aware that a great degree of warmth is experienced at considerable depths under the surface; but this fact does not appear to have attracted so much notice as it probably deserves. —and concludes that ‘many important operations of nature seem to depend’ upon the emanation of caloric from the interior of the earth. In the second, he records a measurement of the water pumped from the Gwennap mines […] through different branch adits, into a large adit or tunnel. The temperature of this accumulated mine-water, near where it is discharged into Carnon Valley, was 69.25 degrees in 1822, and the quantity discharged was computed at 60,000 tons per day. Not only does Kernovian Syndrome exacerbate the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy; in fact, Cornwall is the site of its becoming selfconscious. Iain enters the bus Let’s ask Iain if he’d like to speak a little about the prevailing theories of the earth during this period. IAIN HAMILTON GRANT: Yes, hello everybody, sorry I’m late—but it’s only ‘late’ if you consider things very very locally in terms of timescales…. Theories of the earth to which the problem of heat responds divide into two classes: neptunist and plutonist. It’s about heat, but it’s also about water. The greatest avatar of neptunism—the theory that water

is the cause of the formation of the earth—was a miner named Abraham Gottlob Werner in Saxony at the close of the eighteenth century. Through his mining academy went Novalis, and went also a medical doctor Gottlob Heinrich Schubert who wrote some fantastic reflections entitled Observations from the Night Side of Physics—it’s clear that he was taking various chemicals in order to enhance his ability to write about said night side of physics, this can be easily read, if one consults his documents…. And also the geologist Henrik Steffens, who was Norwegian by origin, and wrote one of the most significant of the Wernerian geological accounts in 1801, entitled Inner Natural History of the Earth. To this day, for some reason, it has never been translated. The only copy I’ve seen is one that was owned by Coleridge and is in the British Library, it’s filled with Coleridge’s excited notes, it’s great to see it, not only to see what one writer, inspired by a miner, should derive therefrom in order to construct a complete theory of the earth; but also what this did to the head of a poet who was otherwise frankly oblivious of the natural world. In any case, that was the neptunist hypothesis: that water was the principal agent in the formation of the globe. The other one, plutonism, concerns the inner heat, the central fire, stating that the earth was in a state of constant igneous fusion. The idea that the earth’s core was in a state of igneous fusion would, of course, account for it getting hotter as one approached nearer to that core. And the observations of Fox as he approached via the mines would have provided evidence at least that there was indeed heat towards the earth’s core. The principal architect of plutonism, James Hutton, was the founder of modern geology and he was a contemporary of Joseph Black, the chemist under whom Humphry Davy, the great Kernovian poet-chemist-geologist, studied in Edinburgh in the 1780s. Hutton’s account was based on having observed the effects of pressure and heat upon rocks. Notably, he discovered at Siccar Point, a rocky outcrop near Edinburgh, that there was no way the formation of the rocks there could be explained by any means other than their having been thrust out of the earth and buckled into their present shape. That was the theory of heat as the central agent in the formation of the earth.

Both of these theories, however, take a crucial hint from a far older theory of the earth promoted by Buffon, whose 1788 Epoch de la Nature hypothesised that it was both a fiery igneous mass and the result of flooding that produced the earth in its current form. He had the idea that the earth as we inhabit it is the result of a giant catastrophe. Basically, an asteroid struck this body, this completed system of nature, and forced the earth into its current position, heating it, melting its ice, and turning it into its current form. The Earth was therefore, according to Buffon, cooling from a state of igneous fusion. Others opposed this view, and insisted that it was heating up—this was a debate going on at the end of the eighteenth century. So fire and water, the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, are etched into the very origins of the theory of the earth.

3. Devoran Quays: Entrepot of the Mines Perran Foundry closed in 1879, although Perran Wharf continued trading until the early twentieth century, when the river silted up. But it can be seen as a kind of prototype for our next location, which was to become what one eighteenth-century writer called ‘the entrepot of the mines of this district, by which, indeed, it was entirely created’— Devoran, a village that owes its existence not to mining itself, but to the enterprise of ‘bringing the port to the mine’. Devoran Quays succeeded Perran Wharf as the principal port serving the Gwennap area. Metal ore headed for South Wales, travelling via the pioneering Redruth-Chacewater railway which ran right to the quayside, was stored in the stone hutches you can still see here, ready for loading onto the one-hundred-tonne vessels that used to dock here, moored to the stone bollards that are still standing. After 1870 the decline of mining brought with it the relative disuse of the port. Then, in 1876, the same fate befell Devoran as had befallen Perran Wharf: the County Adit—of which more later—which drained water from the Gwennap mines, became blocked near its mouth upstream at Twelveheads. The following winter it broke through and so much mining waste was deposited as the cataract gave way that Devoran became silted up to the extent that vessels could no longer reach the quay. KENNA HERNLY: Devoran simply means ‘waters’. This was the busiest port in Cornwall from the 1830s to the 1860s. As you can see on your map, we’re located on the main artery of the circulation system of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, where a panoply of materials went into and out of the local system, serving the many mines of the area. Here the tidal waters swallow up the two rivers that play an important part in our tour, the Carnon and the Kennall, and go on to meet the Fal just around the corner. So this was a really important place. Large ships were able to dock just over there in Restronguet Creek, and then the materials were brought up by tug, or, when the weather was good, smaller boats were able to sail in to dock here. The

railroad came right down along the quay here, and its individual tracks spurred out from the main branch to serve ships that brought the materials in and out. And this was basically all because of the Redruth-Chacewater railway. In the 1820s, a man named John Taylor bought the lease on Consolidated Mines and United Mines at St Day, which we’ll be able to see from Carn Marth later. These mines had been used in the 1750s during the first peak in the copper mining industry in Cornwall, but subsequently closed during the huge depression at the end of the late 1700s. Taylor laid down more money than anyone had ever seen in Cornwall, brought these huge 90-inch engines, reopened these mines. And within a year he had found the largest copper lode anywhere in the world. So he’s up on the hill, and he’s got tonnes of copper ore, but he’s bringing it down to the Fal River by packhorse, as had been done for years, and then taking coal from Wales and timber from Norway back up. And during the winter there are often months when the horses can’t get through. So what does Taylor do? He goes up to London, appeals to parliament, gets a lot of money from his lenders, and builds a railway. It’s the first real railway in Cornwall—there was a small tramway owned by the Foxes and Williams families up in Portreath, but this outshone them by far, and, importantly, unlike most of the infrastructure here, it wasn’t owned by the Fox family—they weren’t even allowed an investment. The railway opened in 1826, and had four branches (although the Chacewater branch was never completed). It served mines all the way from Redruth down to Devoran, through Consolidated Mines, and terminated here. During its peak in the 1830s it was bringing up to 60,000 tonnes of cargo per year. This was still horse-drawn, but the railway lines made it far more efficient and it could operate in all seasons. On your way down you may have noticed on your left these ore bins, that’s where the railway ran, just along the back of them, to tip the rail cars into the ore bins, and then the ore was stored there until it was able to go out—originally, before they had a crane, with men and horses working to transport it out to the ships. The fact that the coal, which was the main cargo being transported, was coming in from South Wales, eventually led to the decline of Devoran. Tin ore had been brought down to the Fal River from the St

Day area right back to the mediaeval period. And John Taylor had just carried on in this tradition, reusing this area as the port. But really, since the coal mines were in South Wales, to dock on the North Coast of Cornwall would make a whole lot more sense, because you wouldn’t have to go around Land’s End and The Lizard, which were really treacherous navigations at that point. Up to fifty boats a year were being lost coming around to these harbours. The Williams and Fox families owned Hayle and Portreath ports, and they started to build a railway to serve them and would entice the copper and coal people to go up there. That competition eventually led to Devoran’s demise. But up until the 1850s there was still enough copper ore coming out of Gwennap to make it practical. Remember, there were something like six hundred mine shafts in this ‘richest square mile in the world’. So, by the 1850s John Taylor could see that he had to make his railway much more efficient, and he introduced steam. He buys a couple of steam engines from Glasgow and within a year has them operating down here. And they completely change the whole thing: you couldn’t have such steep gradients and tight curves with steam engines as you could with horses, so they restructured a lot of the tracks and reinforced the tracks—with iron from Perran Wharf—to be able to carry the engines. The sleepers were granite, which mainly came from the quarry at Carn Marth, which we’ll see later. So this was all part of a tightly integrated local industrial ecosystem. PAUL CHANEY: The road we walked along to get here was very flat, and that was part of the railway, and the road we’ll be driving along to get to the next location is also a part of the remains of the railway bed. Copper was exported to smelt, it was too expensive to smelt here because you needed coal and, since the coal came from Wales, it would have been too expensive to smelt copper in place. So it was instead exported and smelted elsewhere in places where coal was ready to hand. During the period we’re talking about, they mainly used it to make bronze and other alloys that were essential for any machinery, very hard and corrosion-resistant, a metal you can mill and make into

cogs and engine parts. So in that sense this operation was supplying the whole Industrial Revolution. KH: The steam railway did very well until the 1860s, when there was a huge crash in the copper industry owing to mines opening in South America and South Africa. Since the beginning of the century, Cornwall had accounted for fifty percent of the world’s copper, and most of it came from Gwennap. But in the 1860s suddenly the market was flooded and prices plummeted so drastically that many investors who had interests in Cornwall just pulled out. Taylor was left with this railway, and he extended it further into the Redruth area to service more of the tin mines that were still working. This will give you a sense of just how quickly the industry declined: profits in 1869 were about £8000, in 1870 they were £5000, and in 1871, £400. And that was with all the managers taking a pay cut, and not paying any interest on their loans. A drastic decline, which had its effects across the whole area: Carharrack, Gwennap and St Day villages were particularly hard hit by the recession. Once so populous and busy, grass now grew in the half-deserted streets. Thousands of miners emigrated to Australia, to the Americas and to South Africa, tramping to Padstow or Falmouth for passage on an emigrant ship. What few remained had to seek work where they could in the mines that continued working for tin, in Wheal Basset, Wheal Buller, and the other surviving mines around Redruth. The mines here, and in Camborne, turned to the tin that lay beneath the worked-out Copper but in Gwennap no mine was continued long enough to either prove or disprove whether the same state of affairs existed.1 Over the next thirty years, there were a few revivals in tin, but in general the industry was never the same again after the 1830s. The only respite came with the rise of the arsenic industry, as arsenic, or ‘mundic’, formerly thought of as a troublesome waste product, became increasingly important as a raw material for the chemical industry.

4. Point Mills Arsenic Works: The Sublimation of Mundick In the 1860s, 10,000 tonnes of arsenic per year was passing through Devoran port. The importance of this mineral, if not its toxicity, was recognised early, as we can read in William Pryce’s 1778 Mineralogia Cornubiensis: Mundick: An exceeding ponderous Mineral, whitish, beautiful, and shining, but brittle […] Mundick, whose great emporium is Cornwall […] we find it very plentiful in Lodes of Tin, Copper and Lead; with which it is so intimately mixed, that it commonly impoverishes the value of each of its companions, notwithstanding every known method is used by fire, water, and various manuductions, to separate and cleanse them from it. [...] Mundick is such a mortifying inmate, as by its communication corrupts the goodness of the Metal, and renders it harsh, brittle, and ill coloured. Arsenic was thus frequently found clinging to the lodes of tin and copper. As Pryce says, it was regarded as a nuisance, but equally, a maxim among miners insists that despite its troublesome nature, it also serves as an indicator of a good vein of metal: ‘a large lode of Mundick commonly rides a good horse’. Arsenic has been celebrated as ‘the cinderella of British mining’. Today enough deposits of arsenic have been discovered worldwide for it to be of very low value; but in the nineteenth century the nascent chemical industry saw it in high demand, for use in pigments (the fashionable green of Victorian wallpapers), insecticides, sheep dip, mordants (used to fix colour in fabric), to make shot, and as a decolouriser in glass manufacture. ROBIN MACKAY: In early alluvial stream mining, the arsenic was no problem—weathering simply removed it slowly. It was in proportion to the increasing depth of mining as it sought out the primary lodestuff that the arsenic problem arose. Miners called the substance ‘mundic’, ‘silver mundic’ or ‘mispickel’ and recognised it by the fact that, when struck, it gave off a ‘stale-onion-like smell’ (which indeed you can still smell here).

Arsenic in underground lodes, concentrated because it had not been washed away naturally, had to be removed artificially in order to purify the ore. So miners used to heat the ‘black tin’ that came out of the mines, oxidising the arsenic, which would be carried off in the fumes. As early as the seventeenth century there were wellestablished procedures to burn off mundick: Mundick in our Tin (which spoils it by making it britly hard, and not malleable) […] we are necessitated to burn away this Weed in the Kiln […] While the Mundick burns the flame is blue, afterward yellow. The more black tin was thus relieved of its arsenic, however, the more effect this had on the locale, as the hot gaseous oxide released, cooled, and fell on the surrounding countryside as powder (‘white arsenic’). The removal would be carried out in blowinghouses; but as mines became larger and more commerciallyminded, they preferred to integrate the arsenic removal process themselves since they could then achieve a higher price for the tin. This enterprising spirit belongs to the early nineteenth century’s surge of entrepreneurial activity in the area, to which we also owe the local manufacture of gunpowder, as we have seen at Kennall Vale—a sort of early ‘horizontal integration’. This went even further, as it was realised that in the amounts it was being removed, arsenic could prove a valuable product in itself. And so, in 1817, Dr Richard Edwards of Falmouth set up the first works at Perranwell to prepare refined arsenic from mine waste. He encouraged mines to build collection flues onto their mines—what would become known as ‘lambreths [labyrinths]’, convoluted chimney shafts where the arsenious oxide would collect as clear crystals, which then had to be dug out by hand, with miners being sent in to scrape it out and facing the risk of festering wounds owing to the corrosive effect of the crystals. This product was then delivered to the arsenic works to be further purified through various processes of refinement or ‘sublimation’. In 1835, this second refinery was built near Bissoe Bridge. And once there were two companies in the area actively seeking arsenic, the mines soon realised they could make money from selling their soot…making the lemon of arsenic into lemonade.

In 1826, 83 tonnes of white arsenic were exported from Penryn, West-Country arsenic had a particular reputation for being effective at removing impurities from glass. The recovery of arsenic ran from 1815–1950, after which the value had fallen so far it was no longer worthwhile. However, there were plans as late as 1912 to revive Wheal Busy mine purely for the production of arsenic (a plan never put into effect because of the advent of the First World War). Early on, although the association between mundic and copper was recognised, the exact family relation between them was disputed, as Pryce tells us: we know several instances of very large Mundick Lodes, answering the pursuit of the concerned with abundance of Copper Ore in depth; from whence many writers have maternalised this Mineral for Copper, which is bastardising the daughter, whose real Mother is Gossan [a kind of imperfect iron ore]; and yet Mundick does partly contain the feed or vitrioloick principle of Copper, and therefore it may with propriety be termed the father, and Gossan the mother, or matrix, to fecundate the feed. The organic language here reflects the prevalent view that mineral deposits grew and reproduced in the earth in the same way as other forms of life—that growths in the depths of the earth were formed just like the flora and fauna on the surface. This is something that’s reflected in the practices of alchemy—if you think that tin is basically the same thing as gold but at a different stage of maturity, then the process of alchemy is that of the speeding up of the maturation of the metal. But I’m going to ask Iain to say more about this. IAIN HAMILTON GRANT: The idea that minerals might grow, that any inorganic material might ‘grow’, strikes us as merely a use of a metaphor, an analogy. And far from going in the other direction, and saying that minerals are evidence that the whole earth is living, it points to a problem regarding whether or not things can be conceived as part of a system, as organised in some manner, or whether things are extraneous to systems and not organised at all. The very idea, for example, that arsenic ‘rides a good horse’, in terms of finding rich ore deposits, tells you that there are systematic relations between things. So the idea that a thing must be of organic matter in order to be a living thing, in order to be organised, in order to grow, develop, in order to perish, etc., all of these ideas are

secondary in relation to the question of organisation. And this reflects, I think, a confusion around what sciences around the turn of the nineteenth century regard as organicism, or what is regarded as organicism when these sciences are discussed. This for all sorts of reasons is a significant date for today’s exploration. I’m basing a lot of the material I’m using on materials found in Humphry Davy’s 1805 lectures on geology as well as his 1811 lectures on geology; and the precursors, the sources of those. So around this period we start hearing about the death of Newtonianism, we start hearing about the end of mechanism in natural scientific explanation. The reason for this is quite simply that mechanism posits that there are simple, individual, isolated, asystemic bodies from which everything is composed. How those are composed is not a question that is posed. So you find, for example in Newton—the arch-mechanist, perhaps—a simple dualism: there are two categories of things, one of them force, the other atoms. We explore what happens when atoms combine to make things, and that’s all we are exploring. That’s mechanism. One can see already how phenomena of life, although clearly a part of the natural world, cannot be explained in terms of the mere combination of parts. Shelley’s romance Frankenstein is an illustration of what else is required in order to make inanimate bodies animate—the answer there is electricity. The idea therefore that inorganic matter may be brought to life by means of electricity is already lodged in the dawning consciousness of a world of organisation that starts to appear at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. There is a relation between this and questions of alchemy and the development of chemistry, which happens over the same period—Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry is published in 1789—the reason that is such an important date is that chemistry takes over from alchemy, but tries to do exactly the same thing. In other words, it’s a simple dogma of chemical explanation that we do not understand the thing in chemical terms once we have merely broken it down into its constituent parts, its elements or its atoms; we also need to resynthesize those things. The big problem therefore that chemistry investigates is not simply the analysis of the composition of things—what elements make up

what bodies—but also the production of things. Chemistry seeks to reveal the secrets of how it is that nature produces stuff. Bodies are no longer the things out of which everything is made, but rather late consequences of the production process that is the earth. In consequence of this, various theories began to emerge that would help explain the relationship between all these various organisations on the earth. On the one hand, geological, on the other hand, biological—and thirdly, we might mention (mixing the means of categorisation, but never mind), human activity. These three ranges of activity, geological activity, biological activity, and human activity, we might refer to as three stages that we are required to relate if we are to produce a systematic theory of nature. And the way this was done was via a theory called ‘recapitulation’. Recapitulation is a fantastic theory. It holds, for example, that everything that we see in late animals—so for example in man—is simply a recapitulation of earlier ones. I will turn to a particular quote here—this is Lorenz Oken, a notorious philosopher of nature from the end of the eighteenth century who wrote a treatise on the philosophy of nature that was some seven hundred pages long, it started with the relationship between mathematics and protoplasm and ended with a prayer for war…so clearly, a complete nutter! But along the route he was one of the people who developed the theory of recapitulation (although not the only one, and the way in which this theory finds its way into what is subsequently known as ‘serious science’ is instructive). 3034. During its development, the animal passes through all stages of the animal kingdom. The foetus is a representation of all animal classes in time. 3035. At first it is a simple vesicle, stomach, or vitelus, as in the Infusoria. 3036. Then the vesical is doubled through the albumen and shell, and obtains an intestine, as in the Corals. 3037. It obtains a vascular system in the vitelline vessels, or absorbents, as in the Acalephae. 3038. With the blood-system, liver, and ovarium, the embryo enters the class of bivalved Mollusca. 3039. With the muscular heart, the testicle, and the penis, into the class of Snails. 3040. With the venous and arteriose hearts, and the urinary apparatus, into the class of Cephalopods or Cuttle-fish. 3041. With the absorption of the integument, into the class of Worms.2

And so on…and at the end of this ‘so on’, we stand. So in other words, Oken says that the reason a human foetus looks like a fish is because it is a fish. It’s becoming a fish at a specific stage in its development. So that latterly it will be born as a human being. But we’ve all been fish. That’s one account of the theory of recapitulation: it posits that between every stage of an animal’s development, it passes through previous stages of all lower animals. The next development of this entire process is the constitution, as I said earlier, of a threefold parallelism between geological or earth history, natural history or phylology, and human culture, civilisation, and thought. This threefold parallelism is the work of Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, who was professor of comparative anatomy in Stuttgart, in the Karlsschule. Among the luminaries who attended that school and were taught by Kielmeyer is Georges Cuvier, who became professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a really important character in the science of morphology. So this is the serious side of the same thing. And yet it is not Oken but Kielmeyer who says that if there are parallel developments among living creatures there must also be parallel developments amongst inorganic matter, organic matter, and thought. So everything that’s going on in the earth is recovered in the creature, in the living creature. How is this so? His example was the skeleton. The skeleton is simply the mineral being around which flesh, muscle, and organ are wrapped. We are like earths, we are basically like clothes hung off this great stalactite, we are stony-hearted besoms. So we have, if you like, the recapitulation of earth history in our skeletons. We have the recapitulation of natural history in our organs. You can see Oken’s declination of the various organs and the creatures those organs would be, in effect, if they were independent of the organism that we constituted. We next then have to work in the problem of thought: What is it that makes the earth become self-conscious? How is it that nature becomes self-conscious? There is only one way that we know of that nature becomes self-conscious (although talking to Shaun about rats and their uses for urine, I’m not sure that this theory holds water any more, so to speak). And that is through us: we are nature’s way of generating ideas. This is Kielmeyer’s great realisation. If Ideas are natural occurrences, brains have ideas,

brains put ideas out there, brains are natural products and therefore ideas are natural products. So we get that threefold parallelism already established. Or at least the grounds of that threefold parallelism. Instead therefore of looking for the primitive bodies or elements that lie at the root of things, what we try and do is recover or recapitulate, repeat, literally, the constitution or organisation of all these series in everything we do. In point of fact, we can’t help this. As Novalis said, ‘our forefathers’ thoughts are merely the natural product of a previous age, and whereas the earth’s history is layered in strata, our forefathers’ thought, that element of natural production, is in the leaves of a book’. And there we have it—that’s a replacement account, if you like, for atomism, and at the same time a prologue to understanding what’s happening when you’re having an idea, in relationship to the rest of the planet. JAMES STRONGMAN: Copper and arsenic are very close in the periodic table: copper’s 33, arsenic’s 29. So in terms of size, and their properties, they’re very similar. During the mineralisation process in Cornwall, as we discussed before, you’ve got this big lump of granite which has melted, and many of the rocks that are above it contain fluids rich in boron and chlorine, and these elements are vital for dissolving metals. If you just put metal in a river it won’t dissolve, you need these other elements in the fluid, circulating in and around the granite, into the surrounding rocks, scavenging base metals from the granite. And as the granite cools they get forced to the top of the granite and concentrated there. As it cools further, the boron forms a mineral called tourmaline which is quite a pure Cornish granite. So you’ve got this mountain-building episode going on, granite underneath scavenging, and building and cooling. And as this mountain-building episode slows down it relaxes, the pressure comes off, and the fluids are always trying to find the easiest way to the surface, and what they usually do is find old fault lines. One of the classic faults was the Kennall Vale valley, which has its roots four hundred million years ago in a really old fracture in the crust. But many of the lodes strike in similar directions because they’re following these pressure-release fractures. So, as the pressure

comes off, the first thing to deposit is the tin, because it’s the least soluble and has the lowest mobility. So that’s why you get the tin low down and near the granite. The copper and the arsenic and the zinc carry on because they’re still in solution in chlorides. But as they get closer to the surface and the temperature and pressure drop, they start to precipitate. And they precipitate with another element, sulphur, and sulphur has a atomic number of 16. So the arsenic and the copper form sulphides, first, which is where you get chalcopyri with copper and iron sulphide, you get some sulphides, and arsenopyrite, which is the principal form of arsenic mineral. So when they say you’ve hit a load of arsenic, mundic, you’re on a good horse, it’s because if you follow that, you’ll get back to the tin, which is further down below it. Sulphur is 16, arsenic’s got a value of 33, and together they can form arsenides. So instead of two sulphurs you have one copper and one arsenic, so you can get these minerals. And obviously when you’re mining these, it’s quite hard to separate the arsenic from the copper, which is why it caused problems for the early miners. In the Camborne and Redruth area they actually left a lot of this in the ground until later they figured out the processes to extract it. But here, they didn’t have that problem to begin with, because they were mining near-surface deposits which had been enriched by supergene processes occurring near the surface, where rainwater that has percolated into the ground and been heated by the rocks below circulates and oxidates the sulphide ores. There are some really beautiful looking minerals, all the blue and green oddball minerals that are famous in this area, they all derive from this supergene enrichment. So the early miners, when they saw their copper, it was almost in the form of copper itself, it was copper oxide. But as they went deeper they found copper sulphide instead, and that’s where the problems of arsenic start to occur, and you release sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, and you’ve got arsenic going up into the air and getting deposited. Obviously it’s not a great thing to be filling the air with. In fact, one of the main uses of arsenic was that it was sent to the cotton fields of America to be used as a pesticide. SHAUN LEWIN: In a way this is like a slow volcano, pumping stuff from the centre of the earth gently into the surrounding landscape. What

this means is that all these toxic deposits that are buried in the earth are being, through an immense act of human generosity, brought to the surface. One of the characteristic things about the soil around volcanoes is that they’re dreadful places for life; and what we see around us here is the first riposte of nature to this influx of inorganic toxins. So what do I see? Some birch trees, for example, these are classic species for colonising places that have suffered some kind of immense catastrophe. Gradually these reproducing species are finding any small foothold in the area where they can persist for some length of time. Equally, the yellow flowers of the gorse, that’s one of the plants that is in many ways a signal, saying, this soil is desperately impoverished, we’re going to have to nitrify it ourselves by drawing down nitrifying materials from the atmosphere and locking them in the soil, because the soil’s incapable of supporting plant life. JS: The arsenic is still here now, it’ll always be here, it just depends what form it’s in. In an oxide form, it’s quite mobile. When it’s exposed to the air, when it’s oxidised, it’s quite soluble. In its sulphide form, it’s almost completely insoluble, so it’s not going to do anything. That’s the distinction between organic and inorganic varieties of arsenic: If you ate arsenopyrite, you wouldn’t get arsenic poisoning, it’d just pass through you. But there’s a lot of water in these mines that will then oxidise any minerals that are brought to the surface. So you have the potential for catastrophe here—like what happened when the County Adit got blocked and the water level rose, and you had all these freshly-oxidised chemicals pouring out and into the water system. 1. D.B. Barton, The Redruth and Chasewater Railway (Truro: D. Bradford Barton Ltd., revised edition 1966), 63. 2. L. Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy, tr. A. Tulk (London: Ray Society, 1847), 491.