WHEAL DREAMING...

When I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice, I shall buy a house on the North Atlantic coast of Cornwall, preferably near the village of Zennor. There is something only reluctantly English about this part of the British Isles; it is in most respects very distinctly somewhere else.  Although the Cornish language died out in the 18th century determined efforts have been made to restore it.  There is even an active, indeed, lively, Cornish nationalist party, Mebyon Kernow. 

England’s only real historical stake in Cornwall was tin mining.  The heyday of Cornish tin mining was between the 1840s and 1860s – a time of massive industrial growth in Britain as a whole. But recessions and diversification in the use of metals laid the industry low and the last working tin mines closed in the late 20th century. 

The mines were all known by the prefixed proper noun ‘Wheal’, from the Cornish word for mine working, ‘whel’.  These dark and dangerous places often bore romantic names – Wheal Jane, Wheal Martyn, Wheal Henrietta.

In the pretty coastal town of St Ives (to which we shall return this summer) there is a tiny lane called Wheal Dream.  Captivated by the name, I imagined it to be on the site of a long-forgotten tin mine.   I speculated on its fate in this poem (which was subsequently included in an anthology called 101 Poets For A Cornish Assembly.)

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WHEAL DREAM

So I shall build it here
to rest upon and pierce
to the core this,

the old world.  I claim
the seams of tin,
the springs loaded

inside rock. My drills,
my hammers will release
their tension and I

shall be known
by the hard-drawn smoke
that, rising, wires

my stone-dream
to the sky.
Tinmaster.

And my dream
shall falter in
a world that moves

too fast.  And I
shall dwindle too.
My name will rust;

my span of arms
outstretched would bridge
the tiny artery

of the lane
they have named
Wheal Dream.