Qualla: Wheal Jane

Wheal Jane: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 13 January 1992 a torrent of bright orange water broke out of an abandoned Cornish tin mine and poured down the Carnon Valley toward Falmouth Bay. People described it as looking like Mars. The water was loaded with iron, arsenic, cadmium and zinc, leached from the rocks now flooded by abandoned workings, and it killed fish, contaminated wildfowl, and stained the river for miles. The pumps at Wheal Jane had been switched off less than two weeks earlier, the mine itself a casualty of a global crash in tin prices that ended fifteen centuries of Cornish tin-mining. The colour caught the attention of the British press as nothing about Cornish mining had since the 19th century, and the cost of cleaning it up eventually passed twenty million pounds.

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Wheal Jane: A Mine Among Mines

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wheal Jane sits near Baldhu and Chacewater in West Cornwall, in a district that has been worked for tin probably since the mid-18th century, and almost certainly since long before that on a smaller scale. The country rock here is killas, intruded by Cornubian granite, and the ore...

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Wheal Jane: The End of the Tin Price

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 24 October 1985 the International Tin Council, which had quietly stabilised world tin prices since the 1950s, ran out of money to support the market. The buffer-stock manager defaulted. Tin prices collapsed from about 8,500 pounds a tonne to less than 4,000 in a few weeks. The...

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Wheal Jane: The Orange Water

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The pumps had been doing more than just keeping the mine workable. They had been holding back the groundwater that wanted to refill it. Without them, water rose through the abandoned workings, washing over freshly exposed rock faces, picking up acid mine drainage and dissolved me...

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Wheal Jane: What the Mine Left

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

These were, the Wikipedia entry on Wheal Jane drily notes, the days before Environmental Impact Assessments. The Carnon Valley plume forced new thinking about how abandoned mines should be closed, what reserves should be set aside for ongoing water treatment, and who pays when th...

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