News

On August 11, 2016, the West Briton newspaper in the UK published a story under the following headline: “Tin mining at South Crofty could resume ‘within two years'”. And while it’s fair to say that the news caused barely a ripple in the global tin market, it nevertheless represents a potential new instalment in a very old story stretching back over two millennia.

Cornwall, located on the southwestern tip of England, is a singular part of the country. In fact, there are plenty who would maintain that it’s not part of the country at all — local political party Mebyon Kernow describes Cornwall as “one of the four nations inhabiting the British mainland,” arguing that it “has the same right to self-determination as England, Scotland and Wales.”

A wild landscape haunted by lurid stories of smugglers and wreckers, and myths of King Arthur, these days Cornwall is probably known to most primarily as a tourist destination and as the picturesque backdrop of many a TV series.

But the mining tradition in Cornwall goes back, according to various estimates, anywhere from 2,300 to 2,500 years, and at its peak in the late 18th and early 19th centuries this remote corner of Europe was supplying a significant portion of the world’s tin.

[Full disclosure time: I was born in Cornwall, and my surname is relatively uncommon outside of the county, though it does crop up in various far-flung global locations courtesy of the Cornish mining diaspora of the 18th and 19th centuries].

Output steadily declined in more recent times, with the collapse in tin prices following the so-called Tin Crisis of the mid-1980s providing a final hammer blow.

South Crofty — the last operating tin mine in Cornwall, which began large-scale production in the mid-17th century — closed in 1998 and the mine was allowed to flood. In its last full year of operation, 1997, the mine produced 181,320 mt of ore grading 1.42% Sn.

In 2006, various mining landscapes across Cornwall and west Devon were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

But while a number of Cornish mine sites — including the Geevor tin mine, which was a working operation as recently as 1990 — are now museums, South Crofty stubbornly refuses to die.

The site has changed hands several times since its closure 18 years ago, with various plans to restart mining which never came to fr...