The view from Mount Wise car park is good at keeping your attention above ground. The town drops towards the sea, and the Atlantic Hotel gives you a familiar landmark on the skyline. There is quite a lot to look at before you begin wondering what was beneath your feet.
There was a lead and silver mine up here.
Once you know that, it becomes difficult to leave the view alone. Where was the shaft? Where did the miners live? Which bit of the town below had anything to do with it?
The Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey describes the Newquay Lead and Silver Mine working between about 1790 and 1860. It places a shaft, count house and miners’ cottages along Mount Wise Road, with an adit towards Towan Beach.
The car-park view is a modern reference point for the hillside, not a claim that we have found the shaft underneath a particular parking space.
But it is enough to begin putting people back into the picture. Men worked this ground. Some lived in cottages close to the mine. The count house handled the business of it. Below the buildings and the view was an operation extracting mineral, bringing it out and sending it onwards.
The useful question becomes: where did it go next?
Follow the ore across the river
The trail leads down from the hill and across the Gannel.
The urban survey says Newquay’s lead and silver ores went across the Gannel for smelting on the Crantock side. James Gossip’s archaeological survey summary also identifies a silver and lead smelter north-west of Penpol.
So the map needs more than a pin on the hill. It needs the relationship between the mine and the place where the mineral was processed.
That is the next part of this story in The Smelter on the Other Side of the Gannel. The river linked the workings to a wider industrial landscape, with landing places, boatbuilding and routes inland.
Newquay Harbour was important, but the mining economy had more than one way of getting things done. The harbour’s rails and incline have their own story in There Was a Railway Running Out of Newquay Harbour.
The hillside had a job
A count house brings the administrative side of mining into the picture. The shaft belongs to extraction; the cottages put workers close to the operation. The adit adds a relationship between the higher ground and the coast below.
They are different parts of the same place, and each offers something to look for on an old plan.
The later history complicates the search. The survey’s 2003 assessment discusses miners’ terraces and the waterworks and electricity works in this area. By then, successive uses had already changed how the hillside looked.
This is where the easy picture starts to get awkward. A building on a late nineteenth-century map may belong to the next use of the site. Old is helpful; old enough is better.
There is another potential muddle with the mining above Fistral. The survey treats that as a separate working landscape. The names and later changes of ownership need care; merging all the local mine names would produce a much tidier story than the records justify.
Can an old photograph show us?
The Francis Frith catalogue includes a view called Newquay, from Mount Wise 1887. It is an obvious candidate for the comparison I want to make.
The wording is also worth reading properly. A photograph from Mount Wise is not necessarily a photograph of the mine. It may show the town below while leaving the workings behind the camera.
Its date falls after the operating period given by the survey. That makes it useful evidence for the later streetscape, provided the actual image can be matched to a plan.
This is where an old photograph becomes more than an attractive illustration. A road junction, a wall or a recognisable roofline can fix one part of the view. Then we can start asking which of the other buildings belong to the history we are following.
How close can we get?
For now, the research map marks the approximate Mount Wise mine area. The documentary identification is stronger than the precision of the pin.
The exact shaft, count house and individual cottages have not yet been matched securely to modern plots. Nor do we have a surveyed underground alignment which can be drawn from the hill to Towan.
I would like the eventual comparison to be very simple: here is the old plan, here is the same ground now, and here are the features we can actually match. A modern house name or a plausible-looking wall will not quite do that job.
Even before that comparison is complete, the mine changes the view. The hillside had workers living beside it, mineral coming out of it and a connection across the Gannel to a furnace.
The town’s history is becoming much more interesting at street level. Mount Wise is one of the places where the next useful discovery could be a building we have been looking past.