Qualla: Wheal Busy

Wheal Busy: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1866 the miners of Wheal Busy decided they had had enough. A new mine captain had imposed what amounted to a tax on their earnings, an attempt to reduce the mounting losses of a copper mine that had once been called the wealthiest in Cornwall. The miners responded by, in the words of a contemporary newspaper, "attempting to blow up the boilers, laying trails of [gun]powder about the barracks, setting fire to the clothes in the dry, throwing large pieces of iron in the pumps, and other villainous acts." The mine closed shortly afterwards. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the surviving engine houses and Brunton calciner sitting quietly in the hills between Redruth and Truro, in what 18th-century mineralogists called "the richest square mile on Earth."

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Wheal Busy: Newcomen on the Moor

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wheal Busy, originally Chacewater Mine, was probably being worked for copper since the 16th century, but it began producing on an industrial scale only in the 1720s. The principal landowner was the Boscawen family, later Viscounts Falmouth, and the country rock here is killas cro...

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Wheal Busy: The Richest Square Mile

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Gwennap-Chacewater mining district was, by the late 18th century, the densest concentration of copper production in the world. Wheal Busy was at its centre. Over its working life it produced more than 100,000 tons of copper ore and 27,000 tons of arsenic. In 1836 the mine emp...

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Wheal Busy: Boom, Bust, Boom, Bust

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For all its tonnage, Wheal Busy was never quite a financial success. In the 1770s and 1780s the adventurers, the investors who bankrolled the mine, lost more than £150,000 across a decade despite massive output. The mine adopted the name Wheal Busy in 1823, the Cornish wheal mean...

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Wheal Busy: What Stands Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk the site now and you see the Brunton calciner, named for William Brunton, the engineer who invented the rotating-hearth roasting furnace. Arsenic was the product here in the later years. A scheduled monument since March 1974, Wheal Busy sits inside area A6i of the Cornwall a...

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