THE BOTALLACK MINE, CORNWALL.
The Botallack is principally a copper and tin mine, and has in days gone by yielded largely. Mr. Collins descended it to some depth, and found the salt water percolating from the ocean above, through holes and crannies. In one place he noted a great wooden plug the thickness of a man’s leg driven into a cranny of the rock. It was placed there to prevent the sea from swamping the mine! Fancy placing a plug to literally keep out the Atlantic Ocean!
“We are now,” says Mr. Collins in his narrative, “400 yards out under the bottom of the sea, and twenty fathoms, or 120 feet below the sea level. Coast trade vessels are sailing over our heads. Two hundred and forty feet beneath us men are at work, and there are galleries deeper yet, even below that.... After listening for a few moments, a distant, unearthly noise becomes faintly audible—a long, low, mysterious moaning, that never changes, that is felt on the ear as well as heard by it—a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance—from some far invisible height—a sound unlike anything that is heard on the upper ground, in the free air of heaven, a sound so sublimely mournful and still, so ghostly and impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communicating to each other the strange awe and astonishment which it has inspired in us both from the very first.
“At last the miner speaks again, and tells us that what we hear is the sound of the surf lashing the rocks a hundred and twenty feet above us, and of the waves that are breaking on the beach beyond. The tide is now at the flow, and the sea is in no extraordinary state of agitation, so the sound is low and distant just at this period. But when storms are at their height, when the ocean hurls mountain after mountain of water on the cliffs, then the noise is terrific; the roaring heard down in the mine is so inexpressibly fierce and awful that the boldest men at work are afraid to continue their labour; all ascend to the surface to breathe the upper air and stand on the firm earth, dreading, though no such catastrophe has ever happened yet, that the sea will break in on them if they remain in the caverns below.”
THE LOGGAN STONE.
One of the great sights of the Land’s End is the famous Loggan Stone. After climbing up some perilous-looking places you see a solid, irregular mass of granite, which is computed to weigh eighty-five tons, resting by its centre only on another rock, the latter itself supported by a number of others around. “You are told,” says Wilkie Collins, “by the [pg 210]guide to turn your back to the uppermost stone; to place your shoulders under one particular part of its lower edge, which is entirely disconnected all round with the supporting rock below, and in this position to push upwards slowly and steadily, then to leave off again for an instant, then to push once more, and so on, until after a few moments of exertion you feel the whole immense mass above you moving as you press against it. You redouble your efforts, then turn round and see the massy Loggan Stone set in motion by nothing but your own pair of shoulders, slowly rocking backwards and forwards with an alternate ascension and declension, at the outer edges, of at least three inches. You have treated eighty-five tons of granite like a child’s cradle; and like a child’s cradle those eighty-five tons have rocked at your will!”
In the year 1824 a lieutenant in the royal navy, commanding a gunboat then cruising off that coast, heard that it was generally believed in Cornwall that no human power could or should ever overturn the Loggan Stone. Fired with an ignoble ambition, he took a number of his crew ashore, and by applying levers did succeed in upsetting it from its pivot. His little joke was observed by two labourers, who immediately reported it to the lord of the manor.
All Cornwall was in arms, and the indignation was general, from that of philosophers, who believed that the Druids had placed it on its balance, to those who regarded it as one of the sights of the county, and as a holiday resort. The guides who showed it to visitors, and the hotel-keepers, were furious. Representations were made to the Admiralty, and the unfortunate lieutenant was ordered to replace it.
Fortunately the great stone had not toppled completely over, or it would have crashed down a precipice into the sea, but it had stuck wedged in a crevice of the rock below. By means of strong beams, chains, pulleys, and capstans, and a hard week’s work for a number of men, it was replaced, although it is said never to have regained its former balance. The lieutenant was nearly ruined by it, and is said not to have completely paid the cost of this reparation at the day of his death.