Qualla: Great Wheal Charlotte

Great Wheal Charlotte: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard asr, CC0. Walk the cliffs above Chapel Porth and Porthtowan and you cross a clifftop carpeted in late summer with purple heather and yellow gorse. Then you reach the spoil tips of Great Wheal Charlotte and the colour stops. The heaps of crushed rock here are bare. Nothing grows on them, two centuries after the last ore was hauled up the shafts. The lingering heavy metal concentration in the waste, copper and arsenic and cassiterite tin, has kept the slopes sterile while everything around them has greened over. All that stands of the mine itself is the bob wall of one engine house and a fenced shaft, but the bare ground tells you how much rock came out of this hillside.

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Image: Richard asr | CC0

Great Wheal Charlotte: Above Chapel Porth

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard asr, CC0. Great Wheal Charlotte sits on the South West Coast Path between St Agnes and Porthtowan, a stretch of north-Cornish coast where the cliffs drop sharply to small coves of dark sand. The mine was certainly working by 1820 and probably earlier. In its 1830s heyday it was extracting ...

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Image: Richard asr | CC0

Great Wheal Charlotte: Up the Ladder

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard asr, CC0. There were no cages or hoists for the miners here. Access in and out of Cornish copper mines in this period was by ladder. After a long shift in tunnels hundreds of metres below the cliffs, often soaked, often hot, often working ore by candlelight, miners had to climb the ladders...

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Image: Richard asr | CC0

Great Wheal Charlotte: Women and Children at the Surface

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard asr, CC0. A workforce of perhaps 350 men, women, and children worked at Great Wheal Charlotte in some of the busier 1830s years. The estimate is reasonable because nine kilometres away at Consolidated Mines, which produced about six and a half times as much ore, the 1837 statistics record ...

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Great Wheal Charlotte: Stone and Sterile Ground

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard asr, CC0. All that remains of the surface buildings is the bob wall of one engine house, which once held a 60-inch pumping engine installed in 1828. The engine had two boilers and a chimney. The bob wall is the section that bore the weight of the great beam as it rocked up and down to driv...

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Image: Richard asr | CC0