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The Botallack Mine (Bostalek) is a disused mine in Botallack, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom.

Background
The small village of Botallack is at the western end of Cornwall, 6 mi west of Penzance and 7 mi north of Land's End. The area has been inhabited since antiquity; William Copeland Borlase recorded that at one time there were a number of interlocking "Druidical circles" in the vicinity, but by 1861 all traces of them had vanished. Cornwall is one of the few places in Europe in which tin deposits are found near the surface. Consequently, despite its isolation the area was of great economic significance to the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome, who relied on a steady supply of tin for the manufacture of bronze tools and weapons. Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest tin mining operations at Botallack date from around the year 1000 BC, with local miners selling minerals to Phoenician traders at St Michael's Mount.

The area remained dominated by mining throughout the Middle Ages, and in 1377 it was recorded that the 448 inhabitants of St Just, which at the time included Botallack, were primarily miners. In 1584 Botallack was described as "a little hamlet mostly visited with tinners where they lodge and feed, being near their mines". Extremely isolated at the western extremity of the country, Botallack remained an obscure area, best known for an incident on 23 July 1746 in which Charles Wesley, attempted to preach a sermon from the walls surrounding Botallack House. The insane Stephen Usticke, Squire of Botallack, encouraged local villagers to pelt Wesley with vegetables before setting a pack of hounds upon him which chased him back to Trewellard.

Early deep level operations
In 1721 Nicholas Boyns purchased the mining rights at Botallack, and a team of Adventurers (investors) set about creating a deep-level mine. (In the terminology then in use in Cornwall, a wheal or huel was a surface operation in which ore was extracted from a rockface using picks; a bal was a pit dug with a spade; and a mine was a shaft driven underground to extract deep deposits. As surface-level deposits became exhausted and operations which had begun as wheals or bals became deep-level workings, the terms later became interchangeable.)

A shaft approximately 60 ft was sunk, with galleries at the base extending 50 ft in opposite directions; at each end of these galleries a ventilation shaft was dug to the surface, and a further 60 ft shaft was driven. In addition, an adit was driven at sea level, to allow the newly-dug mine to be drained. These shafts and tunnels were dug by hand, by labourers paid on the basis of the distance dug, rather than the then-usual arrangement of allowing the miners to keep a portion of the ore extracted. Few records have survived of the 18th-century operations, and the timing of the various mining works is uncertain.

As each new shaft and gallery was completed, it was opened up to independent miners. These miners, generally operating in teams of two adults and a child, would bid for the right to work a particular stretch of the mine for a month at a time. The miners would cut ore from the rockface, and teams of young boys with wheelbarrows would ferry the ore to the base of the shaft, where it would be winched to the surface and piled in heaps of around 100 tons. Once on the surface, teams of bal maidens (female mine workers) sifted the ore from the surrounding rock, and used hammers to break the chunks of ore.

Miners at Botallack in this period generally lived on common land near the mine. Until the Inclosure Act 1773, anyone moving to an area had the right to build on common land, provided they only build for a single night. Consequently, the mine was surrounded by squalid and poorly built shacks, with no supply of clean water or sanitation facilities. Living in these conditions and working in hazardous conditions underground took its toll: the average age of a miner was only 31, and high infant mortality meant that the average age of death was 25 years 8 months.

Growth
In 1778 the Wheal Cock shaft within the Botallack complex was extended westwards stretching under the seabed for 400 ft at a depth of 600 ft. At points the roof of the mine was 4 ft below the seabed; the sounds of waves were clearly audible to workers within the shaft. During this period Botallack did not use steam engines for pumping or raising ore to the surface, with the mine's first steam engine introduced between 1795 and 1807. Working in such close proximity to the sea proved hazardous. At one point, a seam of ore had been followed upwards too close to the surface, and a hole opened between the beach and the mine. A wooden platform was built over the hole, which in turn was covered with turf and stones to stop the hole. The sea-level adit at Wheal Cock remained in place, and being only just above the high water mark meant that at unusually high tides seawater would flood into the workings. As a result of these leakages of seawater from the surface and of the buildup of groundwater, the mine workings were constantly flooded with brackish water which needed to be pumped constantly to the adit or the surface for the mine to remain operational; in 1822 around 40 impgal per minute were pumped from the workings.

As the mine expanded it continued to strike new deposits of tin, and by 1816 Botallack had become Cornwall's richest mine. A release of 200 shares at £91.5s (about £0 each in 2024 terms) in 1834 provided capital to greatly extend the complex, with the workings reaching a depth of 900 ft by 1838. Also in 1834, a large count house was built to house the administration of the complex. This count house included a long banqueting hall, used to accommodate the monthly gathering of Adventurers at which the profits were disbursed among these investors.

The tin lode did not extend as far as the mine owners had hoped, and the expansion proved a serious miscalculation. With the tin deposits near the surface becoming exhausted, by 1840 serious consideration was being given to abandoning the mine altogether. The mine was saved when, in 1841, a vein of copper was struck, which proved profitable enough for the proprietors and Adventurers to keep the mine operational.

Boscawen Shaft
In 1858 a new, and very rich, vein of copper was struck at a great depth, and it was decided that the cheapest way to extract it would be by driving a diagonal main shaft. The new Boscawen Shaft was duly built, at the then-phenomenal cost of £4000. Over 2600 ft long at a 33$1/2$° slope, the shaft stretched deep beneath the Atlantic. Rails ran the length of the entire shaft, carrying a rope-hauled iron skip, capable of carrying eight miners or one ton of ore. With the new shaft open, Botallack once more became extremely profitable and one of Cornwall's best known mines. On 24 July 1865 the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra visited Botallack and spend two hours below ground, descending the shaft to its full depth and chipping off some pieces of copper ore as souvenirs.

Decline and closure
The mine continued to grow and by 1871 had 700 employees, but faced with competition from overseas mines the Cornish mining industry was beginning to struggle to remain profitable. In 1875 undersea copper mining was abandoned, and the Factory and Workshop Act 1878 hugely restricted the employment of relatively cheap female and child labourers, greatly adding to the costs of Cornwall's already-struggling mines. Over the subsequent decade, more than half the mines of Cornwall and Devon closed.

Although Botallack remained open as a tin mine, the company struggled to remain viable. Between 1890–95 Botallack made a loss of £6 per ton of tin, and in August 1895 the Adventurers disbanded themselves. Deep-level working was abandoned, although mining continued in the naturally-draining sections above the adit, 50 ft deep.

In 1906 a new company, Botallack Mines Ltd, was formed to take over what remained of Botallack and neighbouring Wheal Owles. Work began on draining the flooded mines, digging a new shaft, and installing modern electric and gas powered engines. The new 1461 ft Allen Shaft was completed in 1912, but by this time the new company was in desperate financial difficulties. With little apparent prospect of the mine becoming profitable again, the entire complex was abandoned on 14 March 1914.

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