UK Grid Reference: SW999505
Latitude: 50°19'11"N
Longitude: 4°48'40"W
Great Polgooth lies immediately east of the village of Polgooth, one and a half miles southwest of St. Austell. The eastern part of the sett on Mulvra Hill is now home to the St. Austell Golf Club. Known over the years by a number of names including Old Polgooth, Polgooth United, and as Tregontrees and Old Polgooth, there has been a mine here since at least the 1590's.
Polgooth was well established by 1720. In 1727, Polgooth purchased one of the early Newcomen pumping engines to dewater the mine as it increased in depth. The 50-inch cylinder engine was one of the first to be installed in Cornwall and remained at work until it was replaced by a more modern 58-inch Boulton & Watt engine in 1784. This engine was later replaced by an 80-inch pumping engine made by William Sims and installed in the early 1820's. This ancient tin and copper mine worked a large number of lodes from, as one contemporary report stated, 'not less than than 50 shafts'.
Polgooth closed between 1807 and 1822 as the ore prices fluctuated, but reopened in 1823. The manager at this time was the entrepreneur John Taylor, of Gwennap, later to become famous in mining circles for the connection of the Redruth-Lanner-Gwennap mines by a horse drawn Mineral Tramway.
By 1837, Polgooth was Cornwall's third largest producer of tin, but as the tin price slumped in the early 1840's so Polgooth struggled and closed again. From an average of 260 tons of tin a year between 1852 and 1856, production began to decline. Over the next half century or so, Polgooth like many other Cornish mines produced ore very intermittently, with the mine producing little or lying idle for long periods. Finally, at the turn of the twentieth century, all underground work stopped, although there was some surface work from the ore dumps until 1929.
Spargo (1865) provides a good account of Great Polgooth in the mid 1860s: he writes '... Near St. Austell, is a very old mine, and has yielded tin to an enormous amount, under different companies. The engines and machinery were sold about six years ago, but at present about 100 persons are employed in dressing halvans, &c. (1861.) Lord Mount Edgcumbe and others are the landowners. A 30-inch (double) stamping engine is at work on the mine. Mr. W. Brown, of St. Austell, is the purser'.
Records of production are: 3,000 tons of black tin between 1853-94 and 595 tons of 9.75% copper ore between 1815-1834.
NB Although skutterudite has been listed as occurring here, Dines (1956) and Collins (1892) give this as being the arsenic-deficient variety smaltite.
References
- Hawkins, J. (1818): On some remarkable Phenomena attending the Lodes of Polgooth Tin Mine. Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall 1, 143-153.
- Spargo, T. (1865): The Mines of Cornwall and Devon: Statistics and Observations. Victoria Press (London), 188 pp.
- Collins, J.H. (1892): "A Handbook to the Mineralogy of Cornwall and Devon", 2nd ed., D. Bradford Barton Ltd. (Truro, UK), 108 pp.
- Dines, H.G. (1956): The metalliferous mining region of south-west England. HMSO Publications (London), Vol. 2, pp. 548-550 (see also corrigenda in the 1994 reprint).
External Links
http://www.cornwallinfocus.co.uk/history/gtpolgooth.phpMineral List
12 entries listed. 8 valid minerals.
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