Owles_02_96 Wheal Owles - a photo on Flickriver

The Cargodna pumping engine house and Wheal Edward Stamps house at Wheal Owles.

The Cargodna engine house frequently appeared with some digital tweaking in the 2015-2019 BBC Poldark drama to represent both Wheal Leisure and Wheal Grace. Additional temporary structures were also built on the site.

Camera: Conatx T2 Compact.

Wheal Owles Mine (pronounced 'Oals') lies on the cliffs on the north coast of Cornwall, adjoining Botallack Mine in the St. Just mining area of Penwith. The mine was an amalgamation of several smaller and more ancient mines including Wheal Drea, Wheal Edward and Wheal Gendall. There is known to have been a mine in this general area from the 1700's but Wheal Owles' best years were during the decade 1860-70. By the late 19th Century work was concentrated on the West Wheal Owles or Cargodna section.

For more archive photographs of Wheal Owles please click here: www.jhluxton.com/The-35mm-Film-Archive/Mines-of-Cornwall-...

In this view we see the Wheal Edward Section stamps engine house - beyond are the engine houses of Botallack Mine, Crowns Section.

On January 10, 1893, around 40 miners were working in the undersea level of Wheal Owles and some 400 feet below adit level. They accidentally holed into the flooded old workings of Wheal Drea Mine due to errors on existing plans. The miners thought that they were about 40 yards away and quite safe from breaking into the workings of the old mine but were tragically mistaken. They holed into the workings of Wheal Drea at a depth of some 900 feet (148 fathoms) below the surface. The head pressure on this volume of water must have been enormous and the sea thundered into Wheal Owles trapping over 30 men. There were some heroic deeds on that day and some miners were saved by quick thinking of their colleagues but 19 miners and one mine boy were lost. In 1993 a commemorative plaque was erected as a memorial to those miners lost in the disaster. It proved impossible to recover the bodies and they remain in the flooded workings to this day.
In the 1990s the buildings were conserved and consolidated and the mine has appeared briefly in the 1970s and more extensively in the 2015/16 BBC TV / Mammoth Screen Poldark drama series based on the novels of Winston Graham.

In the 1960s when I was around 7 or 8 and already had a developing interest in Cornish Mining my mother took me for a walk around this site. Neither my mother nor myself had any knowledge of the disaster and I was quite happy to explore. However, for some inexplicable reason my mother urged me to leave and she hurried me away, later informing me she had a really bad feeling about the place and just wanted to get away. A few years later, in my early teens I read a history of mines in the area and found out about the Wheal Owles Disaster. Now I can’t say I felt anything peculiar about the site in the 1960s as a child nor on subsequent visits I have made from time to time. However, my mother often recalled the incident and her urge to get away quickly

Taken in: UK / England / St. Just / Botallack (show map)

Taken on: January 1, 1996

Tags:

WHEAL OWLES

MINING

MINING HERITAGE

MINING HISTORY

METAL MINING

KERNOW

CORNWALL

Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape

CORNISH MINING WORLD HERITAGE SITE

WORLD

HERITAGE

SITE

WORLD HERITAGE SITE

INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

INDUSTRIAL HISTORY

INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE

HISTORIC SITE

NATIONAL TRUST

PENWITH

PENWITH DISTRICT

ST JUST IN PENWITH

LEICA

LEICA X VARIO

MONOCHROME

B&W

BLACKANDWHITE

ABANDONED

DERELICT

DERELICT MINE

DERELICT BUILDING

ABANDOND MINE

RUINS

DISUSED

DISUSED MINE

WWW.JHLUXTON.COM

JOHN

LUXTON

PHOTOGRAPHY

WEST

COUNTRY

WEST COUNTRY

JOHN H. LUXTON PHOTOGRAPHY

1996

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Sets appears in: • Film Archive • Industrial Archaeology more » • Cornwall 1960s to 1990s • Mines of Devon and Cornwall « less

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Camera: Plustek OpticFilm 8200i (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Plustek OpticFilm 8200i
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 25.4 (Windows)
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