The slow death of Cornish tin, and other tales of metal

Telegraph

28-01-2025

Mines are intrinsically
In Under a Metal Sky, Marsden leaves his home near some of the world's richest metal deposits – the Cornish batholith – to visit underground seams of metal across Europe. His route takes him past the sluice gates and peat of the Netherlands, and along the Rhine to consider the bronze layers of meaning in
The charm and the genius of this book is in its ability not to pigeonhole itself. There's no homogeneity here, no forced framework, nor, as far as I can grasp, a strict classification system for the chapters, nor any firm criterion for including or excluding a mine or metal or thing. Marsden's journey isn't contiguous, and he avoids clichéd conceits – for instance, exclusively following Bronze Age trading routes. Avoiding all these old tricks allows him instead to display a quiet depth of knowledge, and a truly impressive network of friends, acquaintances and correspondents among the mining and metal enthusiasts both across Europe and at home.
For instance, take 'the Beardies', a collection of ex-miners, crystal collectors and amateur geologists who meet in a Bodmin pub to discuss all things rock, metal and mine. This doughty group of enthusiasts continue to delve underground, and the early passages in which Marsden descends with them are some of the most vivid. During one trip in the abandoned mine-shafts they find themselves among stalactites, passing blue sheets of copper sulphate, seeing the hobnailed imprint from a miner's boot. During another, they see rubbish from the 1970s tipped down a hole in the moor: a yoghurt pot, a suitcase. European equivalents of the Beardies recur in later chapters, offering anecdotes, philosophical insights and enthusiasm for heavy metal; this might have started to wear thin, but Marsden also introduces a range of historical figures from
Though Marsden's subject matter is European mines, and he's writing in the time of their ebb – probably a terminal one – he remains elegant and detached, and so avoids sounding bleak. The last mine in Cornwall, South Crofty tin mine, closed in 1998 after a fight against economic forces that was meticulously documented by the local news. It was the daily soap-opera of my childhood in the English south-west; series two has now begun, with the hunt for lithium. But Marsden doesn't get drawn into the heat and fury of present-day debates. When he returns to Cornwall to meet the sustainable future, he does so, thankfully, without pomp or bombast: instead, we get an intelligent and gently cynical discussion of 'clean' lithium, which is extracted from tin slag-heaps and recycles the extractive processes of long ago.
The only blip, I thought, was in a late discussion of soil. Marsden takes us on a whistlestop tour of its 'galleries and tunnels and water drops the size of reservoirs, and huge mites scurrying between boulders of sand and clay-cliffs'. Yet it's a shame to generalise that 'soil ecology was not a thing in the 1790s': the many 18th-century lime-kilns built around England's south-western coast attest to just one attempt to 'rebalance' the soil, albeit for agricultural purposes, on a massive scale. Metals, although they form different compounds and pass through different oxidation states, have a certain cleanness and cohesion to them; it's a pity to generalise about the microbiota of soil after such a lucid exegesis on everything else. But in general, Marsden's voice and Under a Metal Sky are restrained and authoritative throughout. I'm only sad that he quashed my belief that the Phoenicians traded in Cornish tin.
Under a Metal Sky is published by Granta at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 5030 or visit