Heathers and heaths are members of the Ericaceae family. The formal definition of a heather is a member of the Calluna genus within this family whereas heaths are members of the Erica genus. Bell heather is actually an Erica and therefore technically not a heather but a heath.
In July 1885, the SS Cheerful left Falmouth for Liverpool with a cargo of two tonnes of Cornish tin ingots. On the way along the North Cornish coast, she collided with the HMS Hecla off St Agnes Head in a very dense fog. The Cheerful sank within four minutes. Thirty-six of the passengers were rescued by the Hecla, but nine went down with the ship, and three more perished shortly after being picked up. The wreck was salvaged in 1994 and a small piece of the cargo is now on display in the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth.
During the Second World War, the 10th Light Anti-Aircraft Practice Camp, Royal Artillery was built on St Agnes Head which included an anti-aircraft battery as well as an army camp. It was known locally by the more snappy name "Cameron Camp", from the name of the landowning estate. After the war, the camp was used for housing but this was all levelled in 1971 and has been reclaimed by the heather. Concrete foundations of the gun emplacements are present in the cliff-top car park.
Plants such as gorse and heather which are able to grow in soils contaminated with heavy metals such as mine waste tips are known as metallophytes.
There was a concern that if the plants accumulated the metals, whilst themselves being unharmed by them, these might still pass into the food chain e.g. via rabbits eating the plants and then onto buzzards eating rabbits etc.
However, a study of plants from the Carnon Valley found that gorse and heather do not accumulate large quantities of trace metals or arsenic in their tissue. A separate study for a PhD thesis found that for some metals such as zinc, the amount in the plant's tissues (though far lower than in the soil) increased steadily with the levels in the soil. However for certain heavy metals such as lead and copper, the amount measured in gorse tissues appeared to barely increase at all with increasing levels in soil.
Therefore it's thought that there are unlikely to be harmful effects of rabbits eating gorse and heather both directly to the rabbits themselves and indirectly to the food chain of other wildlife.
In mediaeval times, blackthorn was associated with evil. This may also tie in with the English word "strife" which has Celtic origins. Straif was the name of a letter used in Celtic Ogham script and was originally the word for "sulphur". Some of the other letters in the script corresponded to tree names. In late mediaeval times, a retrospective assignment of trees to the letters in the alphabet used for Ogham that weren't already tree names became popular (sometimes known as the "tree alphabet") and blackthorn was chosen for Straif.
As gorse ages, it accumulates more dead material. The spiky, springy nature of the plant even when dead means air can circulate well through the dead material and when this dries out in the summer, it substantially increases the risk of fires. As gorse seeds have evolved to withstand fire, controlled burning can be used to used to keep the gorse at a young age where uncontrolled fires are less likely.
The original name for the settlement of St Agnes was along the lines of Breanek or Bryanick, a Cornish name which may mean either "Agnes hill", or more mundanely "pointed hill". Either way, this is likely to refer to St Agnes Beacon. Since prehistoric times, the area was a centre for mining copper, tin and arsenic.
St Agnes Beacon is 630ft above sea level allowing a view of roughly 30 miles out to sea, and a wide panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. Many of the landmarks that can be seen on a clear day are indicated on the topograph on the summit.
More about the St Agnes Beacon.
Due to the curvature of the earth, the distance you can see to the horizon depends on your height above sea level. This increases with the square root of height (i.e. with diminishing returns). An adult typically sees the horizon about 3 miles from the beach. From the top of a 100 foot lighthouse, it is about 12 miles away. At the top of the highest cliff in Cornwall it is roughly 33 miles out but if a 100ft tower were built all the way up here, it would only allow an extra 2 miles to be seen.
If there is an electric fence across the path, look for a plastic handle to unclip it. This is insulated and you can safely pass through if you take care not to touch the rest of the fence. Make sure you re-clip it afterwards to avoid the herd of cattle doing their own St Agnes Beacon walk.
The Ramblers Association and National Farmers Union suggest some "dos and don'ts" for walkers which we've collated with some info from the local Countryside Access Team.
Do
Don't
There are over 4,000 farms in Cornwall covering over a quarter of a million hectares. Over 70% of Cornwall's land is farmed.
Many Cornish mines have names starting with Wheal, and it is a common misconception that Wheal meant "mine". In fact, Wheal simply meant "workplace". The word for "mine" was bal and the women who worked on the surface were known as Bal Maids.
Wheal Cotes is an area of mine workings between Chapel Porth and St Agnes, now preserved and owned by the National Trust. Wheal Coates is reported as working from 1815-1914, although small-scale extraction of copper and tin has occurred in this area since prehistoric times. The surviving buildings date from the 1870s when deep underground mining began on the site. The complex consists of a cluster of buildings at the top of the cliff with another engine house mid-way down the cliff next to the Towanroath mine shaft. Both tin and copper were extracted here and it is said that in its heyday, Wheal Coates employed around 140 miners.
The two engine houses in the upper area of Wheal Coates, nearest the isolated chimney, were used for hoisting the tin ore up from the mineshaft and for crushing it. These were the most modern of the engine houses still standing. One was built in 1880 and the other in 1910 when there was a last attempt to work the mine. The isolated chimney was part of the boiler system for these.
Hoisting devices were referred to as "whims" and before steam engines were available, these were powered by blindfolded donkeys turning capstans.
In order to be processed, ore-bearing rock mined from mineral veins needed to be crushed to a powder. In earlier times, millstones were used to grind down lumps of ore but later it was done using a process known as "stamping" where the ore was crushed by dropping heavy granite or metal weights to pound it against another hard surface (often a piece of granite known as a mortar stone - as in "pestle and mortar"). The crushing was automated first with waterwheels and later with steam engines. The process was far from quiet and could often be heard from a number of miles away.
Once rendered into a powder, the tin ore was separated from fragments of less useful rock, usually using water and taking advantage of the heavier tin ore sinking more quickly out of a suspension than the other minerals. The slurry was sometimes run slowly down an inclined wooden board: the heavier tin fragments would settle near the top and could be scraped off whereas the fragments of lighter rock could be discarded from the bottom, and the material in the middle could be recycled into the next batch. Conical structures (known as "buddles") with rotating brushes were also used. It's possible that the Cornish mining word for the waste sludge of rock fragments - gange - is the origin of the English slang word "gunge".
The building located downhill slightly from the two engine houses at Wheal Cotes was a calciner furnace used to roast the tin ore. A long flue connected this to the chimney at the top of the site.
The granules of ore were heated in a furnace to remove impurities such as sulphur and particularly arsenic. By heating the ore in air, the arsenic impurities could be driven off as a vapour. As the impurities escaped as gasses, the particles of ore melted into grey crystalline lumps of tin oxide known as "black tin".
The exhaust gasses were cooled and condensed to form a white powder deposited in the flues or purpose-built condensers. The white powder - arsenic - was collected and sold. A few grains of pure arsenic are enough to be fatal but the majority of arsenic workers managed to protect themselves by stuffing cotton wool up their noses and painting their faces and any other exposed areas of skin white with fuller's earth to prevent arsenic being absorbed through the pores of their skin.
An annual festival called "Bolster Day" is held at Chapel Porth, starting in April and culminating on 1st May. Giant puppets are used to re-enact the Cornish legend of the young girl, St Agnes, who slays Bolster - the fierce giant, who was rumoured to eat children and overcame the Knight, Sir Constantine and a procession of local dignitaries and heroes. Bolster's Blood has given its name to one the ales brewed by the Driftwood Spars pub and brewery.
At this point you can take an optional diversion to Chapel Porth beach by following the path to the left, returning here to continue the walk.
The walk continues to the right. Follow the path from the bench, past the engine house to a reach a fork at a waymark.
The engine house beside the coast path near Chapel Porth is known as the Towanroath Pumping Engine House and was built in 1872. It was used to pump water from the 600 ft deep Towanroath shaft adjacent to the engine house. The shaft was used to access a vein of tin just below sea level.
Cornwall's iconic engine houses were built to house huge beam engines - a type of steam engine with a pivoting beam. This configuration was particularly suited to powering pumps to stop the quarry pits and mines from flooding as water trickled into them from above. Inside the engine house, steam from a boiler would push up a piston, causing the beam to tilt downwards, pushing the pump down into the shaft. The steam would then be shut off and cold water would be used to condense the steam within the piston back into water, creating a partial vacuum. Atmospheric pressure then pushed the piston back down into the vacuum, raising the beam and lifting water out of the shaft. The valves to apply the steam and cold water were mechanically automated, maintaining a steady rocking motion of the giant beam.
The headland is known as Tubby's Head and there is a blowhole in the headland which emits a plume of spray during a large swell.
An Iron-Age fortification is situated on Tubby's Head near Chapel Porth. The flat area on the top of the headland is separated from the mainland by a metre-high bank approximately 20 metres long. The exact function is uncertain: it could either have been a promontory fort or possibly a defended landing area as there is a flat rock by the waterline which could have served as a natural quay.
The pyramidal cages and coarse grilles covering mineshafts allow bats to be able to roost in the shafts. Shafts which are fenced and completely open are one of the favourite nesting places of the Cornish chough. Therefore resist the temptation to drop stones down the shafts otherwise you may unknowingly be stoning bats or chough chicks to death.
Pasties became popular with miners initially as a meal that could easily be carried to work though some mines eventually had stoves so a batch of pasties could be lowered down raw and baked fresh at the bottom of the shaft. Mines were very wet places so keeping a pasty dry for several hours would have been a real challenge.
The popular story of pasties eaten in mines being held by their crimped crust which was then discarded is likely to be an urban myth. As well as the difficulty of holding a "man size" pasty by its crimp without it snapping off. You can try this experiment for yourself with a "large" (enormous) size Philps pasty (but not on a harbour wall). Miners were generally too poor and hungry to throw away food. Photos from the 1890s show miners with pasties wrapped in a cloth bag to keep them clean down a mine. Some researchers (very dedicated to the pasty cause) have checked through thousands of photos and found none where a miner is holding a pasty by its crimp.
The coastal lookout on St Agnes Head was built by the National Trust in 2008, replacing an earlier lookout at the same location which was built in 1926 but had become unsafe. The lookout is run by volunteers from the National Coastwatch Institution who reopened it in 2007, 16 years after its closure as a Coastguard lookout. The volunteers on watch, unless engaged in an emergency, welcome walkers and non-muddy dogs to see inside the lookout.
The larger engine house in the upper area (with its own chimney) was built in 1872, at the same time as the pumping engine house further down the hill. The one up here was used both to raise ore from the mine and also to power a stamping mill to crush the ore.
The stamping mill installed in the 1870s was a Cornish design where heavy wooden vertical poles tipped with crushing stones were lifted and released by a rotating horizontal pole with protruding pegs to lift the vertical poles.
By the time the mine was re-opened in 1910, a new style of stamping mill had been designed in California. One of these, powered by a gas engine, was installed on the other side of the path from the old stamping engine. There are now just some remains of the foundations.
Californian stamps were developed in America during the gold rush and had a number of design improvements over the Cornish stamps from which they were derived. Rather than using square stamping heads, the Californian ones were round and the mechanism was designed to rotate them as they were lifted so that the wear on the head was evened-out. Californian stamps were also more rapid and could crush 50% more ore in the same amount of time as the traditional design and this led to their use in Cornwall too.
Vugga Cave is at the northern end of Chapel Porth, which can only be reached at low tide. The name is from an old mining term vug which the Chambers English Dictionary defines as "a Cornish miners name for a cavity in a rock".
The natural cave connects to a network of mine workings. Subsequently it was adapted into a mine drainage adit: at the far end of the adit is a waterfall where it connects to the Towanroath mineshaft, draining the water out of the shaft. The vertical shaft continues below sea level, which is now flooded.
Tin is a semi-rare metal well-known for its corrosion resistance which is used extensively in electronics, engineering alloys and anti-corrosion coatings. Unlike many other "heavy" metals, it is not poisonous which has resulted in its use within food packaging - the ubiquitous "tin can" - and increasingly as a replacement for lead, which was used extensively before its toxicity was understood.
Tin is found in Cornwall as the ore cassiterite (tin oxide) which occurs in small crystals amongst other rocks; even a "rich" tin ore only contains 5% tin. The name for the ore is thought either to come from the Greek kassiteros meaning "tin" or from the Phoenician name Cassiterid for Britain and Ireland.
When a bar of tin metal is bent, it emits an audible screaming/cracking sound, known as a "tin cry". This freaky behaviour arises due to a crystallisation phenomenon known as "twinning" that occurs frequently in tin, where two or more crystals grow out of each other, sharing a common section (the name arose from "Siamese twins"). The "crying" sound is caused by these joined crystals snapping apart.
At temperatures below 13.2°C, tin slowly changes from a silver-white metal to a grey, crumbly, non-metallic form which causes tin objects to gradually disintegrate at low temperatures. The decomposition catalyses itself, so speeds up once it starts. The transformation, known as tin disease, tin pest, tin blight or even tin leprosy, was first noticed on cathedral organ pipes in the Middle Ages and was assumed to be the work of the devil. As lead is phased out of the solder in electronic items leaving principally tin, this presents a technical challenge as solder which disintegrates all over a circuit board in the cold, only to become conducting again when it warms up, is a recipe for short-circuits.
Jackdaws can be distinguished from other members of the crow family by their short black beaks and grey necks. They are smaller than all the other black birds in the crow family and are only slightly larger than jays.
Jackdaws are able to recognise eye gestures from humans (e.g. if someone looks at where a food item is hidden). It has been suggested that jackdaws may use this with other birds too and this may be the reason that they have a striking blue eye colour that is easily seen from a distance.
Jackdaws are very adept vocal mimics and have been known to sing virtually anything including opera and Madonna! They can be trained to copy the human voice but only for single words or short phrases.
Jackdaws also use a their calls in a democratic process to make group decisions for a flock such as whether to move location. If enough of the birds "vote" by making their voice heard, the entire flock will respect this and take off, even the birds that didn't vote for it.
Jackdaws have been found to share food and will share more of a preferred food than an unpleasant one. Although the sharing often takes place in courtship and parenting, the behaviour has also been observed in unrelated birds. It is thought that this pro-social behaviour might be a sign of reciprocity ("do unto others...") and possibly empathy.
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