World Heritage Site
and the
Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project
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This area was granted World Heritage Site status in 2006

The Caradon Hill and Minions area (the major part of the "Liskeard Mining District") is one of ten areas of Cornwall and West Devon that won World Heritage Site status from the United Nations. This mining area includes the South Caradon Mine (which in 2004 was the subject of the BBC programme "Restoration"), and many other copper and tin mining sites that date between 1700 and 1914. After having won World Heritage Site status for Cornish mining heritage in this part of Cornwall, the Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project will be building on this.

South Caradon Mine

Mining in Cornwall, whether it was for tin, copper, arsenic, or any of the other minerals mined here, was an extremely hard life, and miners lives were mostly short. If accident and injury did not find them first, then debilitating lung disease from the dusty unventilated atmosphere, and the long shifts "below grass", soon started to take their toll. Working underground, and climbing the long fathoms of ladders down and back to the surface at the end of every shift, was not for the faint-hearted. John Harris was a nineteenth century miner-poet, and what he writes here is very evocative...

"The Mine"
"Hast ever seen a mine? Hast ever been
Down it in its fabled grottoes, walled with gems,
And canopied with torrid mineral belts,
That blaze within the fiery orifice?
Hast ever, by the glimmer of a lamp,
Or the fast waning taper, gone down, down,
Towards the earth's dread centre, where wise men
Have told us that the earthquake is conceived,
And great Vesuvius hath his lava-house,
Which burns and burns forever, shooting forth
As from a fountain of eternal fire?
Hast ever heard, within this prison house,
The startling hoof of fear? the eternal flow
Of some dread meaning whispering to thy soul?"

(Reference: "The Meads of Love: The Life and Poetry of John Harris 1820-84", Paul Newman 1994;
and quoted in Philip Payton's "Cornwall: A History", published in 1996 and 2004).
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Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project  (CHAHP)
is a £2.8m project, funded largely by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF),
with Cornwall County Council, and Caradon District Council.

~ Stage 1 of the project officially started in December 2007 ~

Extensive Cornish Mining sites exist around the Minions and Caradon Hill areas, where copper mining was at its height during the 1840s to the 1890s. At Minions, you can visit the Minions Heritage Centre, that now occupies the Engine House of Houseman's Shaft, which was a part of the old South Phoenix Mine, and now serves as the base for CHAHP. This is a wide ranging project will provide for significant conservation of the natural and industrial heritage of an area that covers not only Caradon Hill, but most of the south east corner of Bodmin Moor and south to Liskeard. It includes several significant copper and tin mining sites in the area , as well as many other prehistoric sites, a large number of wildlife, geological and conservation area sites, and over 100 scheduled monuments. Stage One which is now underway, and is the development stage of the four-year £2.8million project, which is being used to develop and plan the many project "programmes" that were proposed during the HLF bid process.

Houseman's Engine House (now the Minions Heritage Centre)
~ and also where the Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project is now based ~

Stage Two of CHAHP, if approved at the end of 2008/start 2009, will be the implementation phase of the project, aimed at conserving the landscape and working nature of the moor, managing access to the many historic, natural, archaeological and industrial mining heritage sites, plus the physical conservation and consolidation of mine site structures; together with an extensive education and training programme, all of which will be involving as many local people as possible.

The rich heritage that is left to us from Cornwall's industrial past still needs to be carefully protected, but only within the overall management and conservation of both the natural and historical environments that have been left in our care. Most importantly, Bodmin Moor needs to be respected as the living and working landscape that it still is, where the welfare of the livestock and land is preserved.

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More details of the CHAHP project will be posted soon - check back again!
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Visit the remains of the old Wheal Victoria Copper Mine at Golitha Falls!