Some years ago I visited Geevor Tin Mine in Cornwall, now a museum and heritage centre, covering an area of 67 acres. It was formerly a working mine, among the foremost in the area and is the largest preserved tin mining site in Great Britain.
One of the most poignant moments of my visit was entering The Dry, an area where miners would have changed into and out of their working clothes at start and end of shift.
The Dry has been preserved unchanged, with safety helmets and overalls hanging where the departing miners left them at the end of their final shift in 1990.
THE DRY
Overalls and safety-wear,
hung carelessly at that last night-shift’s end
in the long locker-room loud with shouts and banter,
hang now,
abandoned
in the empty Dry.
A patina of red dust covers everything.
On pegs, drab boiler-suits, like terracotta men, line up
as though to muster at the shaft’s mouth
for another shift, another morning.
Once, coarse bravado conquered fear
of the laborious descent, of voluntary entombment.
Like Jonahs in the whale’s dark gut,
men sweated, year on year, for meagre pay.
Some died in those recesses, bodies winched up to the light,
to be interred again
with prayers and season’s flowers.
Now, all is history: tin-mining an anachronism, the pit
a heritage trail for visitors in shorts and beanie hats.
A Cornish way of life, hereditary, vanished,
its roots, deep in pre-Christian times, outdated now,
its doughty sons dispersed and gone,
yet still they hang on pegs in rows, those overalls and safety-hats,
imprinted with the russet dust
they carried from that underworld
along with what men sought within
the belly of the monster, tin.
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