There was a lead and silver mine on Mount Wise.
That immediately makes me want a map. Where was the shaft? Which buildings belonged to it? If you stood there now, what would you be looking at?
“Somewhere up on Mount Wise” is a start. It is also the point at which local history becomes slightly frustrating. A mine has machinery, access, waste, water and people to accommodate. It occupies actual ground.
The Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey gives us a useful beginning: the Newquay Lead and Silver Mine, worked between about 1790 and 1860, with a shaft, count house and miners’ cottages along Mount Wise Road, and an adit towards Towan Beach.
That puts an industrial system into the middle of the town.
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.
That is why a building marked on a late nineteenth-century map cannot automatically be labelled as an operating mine building. We need to know which phase it belongs to.
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.
Follow the ore across the river
The most interesting connection leads away from Mount Wise.
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.
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.