The History & Heritage of

Chypraze Farm

Mining heritage:

How did those two mining families make a living on Chypraze?

Mining in Cornwall began in the early Bronze Age around 2,150 B.C. when metal traders from the eastern Mediterranean were regular visitors. They named Britain the Cassiterides that is Tin Islands.

Cornwall and the far west of Devon provided tin, copper and arsenic. The tin was found originally as alluvial deposits in the gravels of stream beds but eventually underground working took place. Tin lodes outcropped on the cliffs and underground mines sprung up as early as the 16th century.

By the 19th century tin mining and extraction of the metal from the ore was a major industry in the area of around Morvah. The Rose Stream would have once been “streamed” for tin and the metal deposits literally scooped from the stream bed. There is evidence of bank side excavation and there are a number of narrow shafts accessing the seams below. As late as 1927 barrow loads of dark sand was being winched up from the beach rich in tin.

The living our two families made in 1841 probably wasn’t so much from actual mining on Chypraze as the treatment of the ore brought from mines nearby. For Chypraze has something really important in the era before steam power; water power. The Rose and Portheras Streams that meet before joining the sea at Portheras Cove provided the only source of motive power in the area. A great deal of ingenuity was brought to bear to extract every last ounce of power from the stream in a way that could render the tin from cart loads of ore brought to the site. In 1584 a commentator, Norden, recorded the following:

Morvah Mills: ‘The owre being with greate labor and charge gotten, requireth muche after-coste and trowble: firste it is broken with mightie hammers of iron; afterwards stamped to a lesser size with stamps headed with iron and raysed with a wheele which is driven with the force of water: Then is it made farr smaller with a mill called a Crazing mill, which grindeth it to a small powder; then it is washed with a mylde currant of water that falleth upon greene turffes, carrying away the sande, and leavinge the mettall.’

Two hundred and fifty years later our two mining families were using the same methods to extract the tin. The mysteries and remains of these process lie hidden still beneath the undergrowth and it for this reason that Chypraze has been included within the boundaries of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site that achieved World Heritage status in July 2006.

See www.cornish-mining.org.uk for more detail.

The collapse of the world tin cartel in 1986 was the last nail in the coffin for Cornish tin mining. "Cornish lads are fishermen and Cornish lads are miners too. But when the fish and tin are gone, what are the Cornish boys to do?"

Graffitti on the side of South Crofty, the last mine to close.