Carn Brea is a hill of commanding personality, steep and rugged, and encumbered with huge granite boulders, that give its highest point a peculiarly fantastic corona. Here, where rocks are largest and more wildly strewn, long-forgotten builders have contrived a gaunt tower, perched airily on devil-poised crags, overlooking the scarred and streaked mining-field that here stretches from sea to sea. It is with disgust that, as you make a painful and involved ascent of the hillside, and draw nearer this old fortress, you observe its walls repaired with stucco, and its windows filled with ginger-beer bottles and bottles of sweets.

Exploration always brings its peculiar disillusionments; it had been better for a proper and enduring reverence of Carn Brea and its gory Druidic traditions to have gazed and speculated from below than to have resolved our speculations into facts so uncongenial. For, really, to view Carn Brea from the valley on a day of mingled storm and shine is to receive an impression of grandeur and Brocken-like weirdness. The Druidical cromlechs and stone altars of Borlase’s vivid imagination, the craggy tower, the modern Dunstanville pillar, break the sky-line into mysterious points and notches; even the white cottages, the brutal ugliness of the Dissenting chapel, and the merely commercial aspect of the tin and copper mines of Pool village, that straggle down into middle distance and foreground, take a decorative value and strange significance.

The roadways that lead from Pool into Camborne are bordered on either side with immense heaps of crushed rock and dirt, the roads themselves grimy with coal-dust, where they are not stodgy with the overflowed red mud from the mine-adits. Pool itself is notable for nothing, except that its railway station, now named Carn Brea, was once a fruitful source of error in sending passengers and goods to Cornwall, instead of to the Poole in Dorsetshire. Hence the change of name.

Rather more than a mile down the road is Camborne, and midway are the huge works of that very ancient tin and copper mine, Dolcoath, which on week-days make the country side resound with the blows of their steel stamps crushing up the ore-laden rock by the ton. Some of the galleries of Dolcoath mine are 2300 feet deep, and over five million pounds’ value of tin and copper ore have been brought to bank. I have been here on a week-day, when the stamps were at work, and the noise was simply terrific. I have never heard anything to equal it. Not only is it impossible to hear or be heard in speaking, but the mind seems almost to be stunned by the clamour. And to the stranger, the result of all this uproar is merely so many streams of leaden coloured water, flowing into what look like great mud reservoirs. But the grey and slate-coloured particles that go to the colouring of those streams are so many grains of tin ore, and the neat-looking girls who are stirring up the reservoirs with brooms are not engaged upon making mud-pies, but are busily washing the impurities from the metal grains.

Camborne streets straggle almost as far as Dolcoath, and doubtless many of them are built over some of the galleries and levels of that immense mine. Camborne is an offence to the eye. It is much larger than either Truro, Redruth, or Penzance, numbering 15,000 inhabitants, most of whom live upon mines, either directly or indirectly. Indeed, many of them live in the mines, and merely come home to sleep. Thus it is that all day long Camborne seems almost a city of the dead. It is a town whose houses, if not squalid, are the most abjectly characterless of any I have ever seen, stony granite affairs, which wear the look of having once upon a time been inhabited—but a very long while ago, and meanwhile having been preserved from decay by some mystic preservative power.