Qualla: South Crofty

South Crofty: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 6 March 1998, the cage at Robinson's Shaft lifted its final shift to the surface, and Cornwall stopped being a tin country. Somebody had spray-painted a slogan on a corrugated wall at the gate: 'Cornish lads are fishermen, and Cornish lads are miners too. And when the fish and tin are gone, what are the Cornish boys to do?' South Crofty had been digging tin out of the granite under Pool since at least 1592 — older than the East India Company, older than Shakespeare's late plays. For four centuries it had outlasted every other Cornish mine. The last men out walked into bright Camborne sunshine and an industry that had simply, finally, run out of price.

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

South Crofty: Two and a half miles wide, half a mile deep

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The numbers make the mine sound like a fact rather than a place. South Crofty's workings extend nearly two and a half miles across and three thousand feet down, threading over forty named lodes through the granite under the village of Pool. By 2012 its setts had swallowed up the ...

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

South Crofty: The price of tin

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0. South Crofty's century is a graph of the global tin price drawn in the lives of Camborne families. Copper had carried the mine until shallow reserves failed around 1880, and a sudden price crash in 1896 flooded the workings; new backing in 1899 brought South Crofty back from the ...

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Image: Tony Atkin | CC BY-SA 2.0

South Crofty: Underwater

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EvaK, CC BY-SA 2.5. When mining stopped, the pumps stopped. South Crofty filled with water from below at a rate that engineers measured in tonnes per minute, and within months the lower workings were drowned. For a quarter of a century the mine sat sealed under its own water table while the surface ...

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Image: EvaK | CC BY-SA 2.5

South Crofty: Reopening

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Helen Wilkinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. In October 2017 the UK Environment Agency granted a permit to discharge up to 25,000 cubic metres of treated mine water per day into the Red River, and Cornish Metals began building a water treatment plant. Drilling resumed in 2020. In January 2025 the National Wealth Fund commit...

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Image: Helen Wilkinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

South Crofty: Flying over

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the air the survival of South Crofty's surface plant is what catches the eye. Robinson's Shaft headframe and the long roofline of the dressing floors still stand at the southern edge of Camborne, the only intact deep-mine surface complex of its kind in southern England. The ...

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Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0