Wheal Victoria Copper Mine
(at Golitha Falls)

"All hail! Victoria!"
" All hail! Victoria! yet thy star is set - thy existance was but brief, and not even royalty could protect thee from
thy fate. Alas! Victoria is no more! for, notwithstanding the aid of sovereigns, the pit, which was sunk by those who
most lauded thee whilst living, has closed upon thee for ever. No longer shall the pick and gad resound in
cheerfulness - no more the count-house punch be handed round to wish thee brighter days; nor shall
the yule log blazon on the now deserted hearth. Thy glory has fled! the lustre which thou shed around in thy
halcyon days is forever gone, and now, alas! we mourn the loss of the last sovereign, so much endeared to us.
Reader, be not alarmed, it is simply that 'the bal is knacked'. "

...excerpt from the Mining Journal (11th July 1846).

Scources researched: "Mines and Miners of Cornwall" Vol. XII (A.K. Hamilton Jenkin), pub. 1966; plus various
other excerpts from Mining Journals (courtesy of the Cornish Studies Library, Cornwall Centre).

The First Excavations
Wheal Victoria was started in 1844, and at the first meeting of the Mine "Adventurers", or investers, held at Webb's Hotel in Liskeard, it was reported that the mine contained eight lodes, of which five were three feet wide. During the first year, an adit was cut that crossed two small branches of copper, and it was claimed that the copper discovered was an extension of the rich lodes recently found at both the South Caradon and West Caradon Mines on Caradon Hill. In 1846, after 2 years and a cost of £4000, the mine was abandoned with the above announcement.

The First Adit
Not far into the lower woods of the Golitha Falls National Nature Reserve, is the entrance to what is likely to be this first adit, which also seems to be very small. The access cutting may now be blocked by the courses of old leats (water channels) and new paths, but the gated adit is now home only to bats.

The first Adit

Looking inside the small adit, flooding is immediately apparent. The adit appears to curve to the right and down, and seems small for regular human access. It was perhaps only used for pumping.

In September 1853, the Wheal Victoria mine Engine Shaft was stated to be down to 57 fathoms (342 feet), this being 40 fathoms (240 feet) below the level of the horizontal adit. This was stated as being "a depth quite sufficient for proving the productive, or unproductive character of the different lodes". The main copper lodes run east-west, and a considerable amount of additional underground cross-cutting (on a cross-coursing vien running north-south to the main lodes), was subsequently carried out to over 7 fathoms (42 feet) in each direction, but with little success.

In this same Journal it is reported by Mr. Oliver O. Trewren on the 2nd September 1853, that "I consider the mine a fair speculation, and in regular course of development. The sett itself is a continuation of the Caradon granite, which, together with the cross-course and the lodes is of a character precisely similar to that of the mines of the district, and a few months of spirited perseverance will prove the value of the property."

Mine Buildings
Near the entrance to the Golitha Falls nature reserve, was this perhaps the site for some of the old copper ore dressing floors, other associated mine buildings, or the count house or hut? From here, can also be found the well used (miners?) path, that goes up to the main Engine Shaft, that can still be found in the woods above the falls to the left. (See later photographs).

The first adit as detailed above, may well be linked to these two massive water wheel features. The wheel pits housed wheels 30 feet in diameter, which were worked by water fed along a series of leats, or water channels, feeding into the back of the wheels in "under-run" or "under-flow" fashion. The wheels then operated, via "balancing bobs", a series of flat-rods that linked to either the main shaft, or a nearby adit, for pumping out ground water from the mine sump.

The exact purpose of the two wheel pits has been difficult to explain, as on the face of it, they do not appear to have been employed for copper ore stamping (there are no obvious sign of remains of any ore stamps, nor even any obvious location for them), and if conversely, they were used for pumping, they seem to be unnecessarily far removed from the only shaft which is now visible.

Or are they? It has been documented that the (or at least one) water wheel was used to operate 150 fathoms of flat-rods, and the adits were only 70 fathoms and 100 fathoms deep. This leaves a good 50 to 80 fathoms (300 to 480 feet) between the wheels and the adit or shaft. The second adit (see below), is in fact quite close to the wheel pits!

The second wheelpit can be found a little further along the side of the falls, and will be seen to be in a similar state of repair to the first, though perhaps a little less encumbered by trees.

But why two wheel pits rather than one? Perhaps there were stamps nearby. What purpose did the small structure at the waters edge serve (see the photograph below)? However, the best access to remove the ore would have been from the main shaft up on the hill, then down the access path to the road/track over Draynes Bridge (or the ford, as the existing bridge was only built in 1876), and not by carrying it down into the woods, or out of the adit, to the relatively inaccessible wheelpits.

There is no sign or indication there was ever an engine here, although this may refer only to a simple horse driven whim - although there is precious little space nearby for that! There is however a small additional hollow adjacent to, and linked to the shaft hollow, that may have accommodated some form of whim or lifting gear that would have served the shaft head. Access to the mine down the main shaft is most likely to have been via ladders and timber stagings though, rather than by any "man-engine" that could have been operated on the back of large timber rods, as would have been used for the pumping out of water from the mine (pumped out via a lower adit level).

The shaft top is in a gentle hollow by the side of the track, and unusually, it is not capped with concrete, or "choked" (run-in). A grill covers it, and it is possible to peer down into its murky depths. At the top of the hollow is a large flat area overlooking the valley, and across to Redgate, that was perhaps the top and edge of the mine dumps. This would have been where the waste material was literally dumped at the surface, close to where it was brought up, that had been extracted from both the shaft (when it was sunk), and the mine "levels" (where the "lodes", or viens of ore were worked). The mine shaft is now a home to the bats that live in the mine, and forms a part of what is now known as the Golitha Falls National Nature Reserve (or NNR), managed by English Nature.

Looking down the shaft itself, the narrow opening lower down implies the shaft was only ever used for limited access by miners themselves - there would have been only just enough room to climb down, if the hole was no bigger originally than it is now - or the shaft was used solely for ventilation. It may also have been an early exploratory shaft sunk at the start of the mine's life.

The exact location of this shaft, apparently accessible from the second large adit described below, is now lost to history, and no maps as yet seen show any record of it. Despite the limited amount of documentary evidence relating to the old Wheal Victoria mine that has been found to date, and its apparent smallness in size, the mine itself appears to have had a significant impact on the local landscape, with several shafts, adits, water-wheel pits, and other surface features either present today or known to have existed previously. The appearance of Golitha Falls, Draynes Wood, and the area around what is now South Draynes, must have had a very different look and feel in the 1850s, with its mine and industry, to the lovely wooded valley and nature reserve that it is now.

For information about the practical aspects of copper mining in Cornwall during the 1850s, before the days of machine drilling and high explosives (as it would have been at Wheal Victoria), visit John Higgin's excellent website at www.higgsoldminestats.com, which has details of the methods used at the Wheal Agar near Camborne, both underground and at the surface.