The Riches Beneath our Feet: How Mining Shaped Britain [Hardcover]

An interesting book which doesnt really live up to its title - unless this is one first foray into the field of mining in Britain. it is rather basic and lacks detail - perhaps that was the intention? There is no mention of Ireland - OK - not strictly Britain but inextricably linked and during the history being discussed Ireland was more or less part of Britain for a large part of the time.

It is dificult to compare this book to any others directly - but one which springs to mind (and which covers some of the ground) is SALT by Mark Kurlansky - a book in an altogether different league. I am not a fan of trying to cover a very wide subject at the "scratching the surface" level - but feel it would be better to read some of the references instead (these are an excellent list of books to read by the way).

As a Devonian (and a miner long since followed the industry to distant lands) there is a lack of real reference to Devons role in Copper and Tin (and lead and ball clay - factors seemingly missed) - it seems all is Cornwall. Yes, Cornwall did have the bulk of the mines (and one of worlds best mining schools, if not the best (another factor skipped over) but didnt do it alone. The last photo isnt "a view of a Cornish mining area" it is a view from Cambours looking towards Carn Brae (the monumner is visible on top of the hill in the background) - more accuracy required - and I believe Dolcoath is spelt incorrectly.

The maps are basic and could do with some better ones (since this will be targetting the tourist) and perhaps a reference to appropriaute OS maps?

The author appears to be mostly from an industrial mineral background (coal, slat, potash) and this might explain the bias in those directions?

To get a proper appreciation of this book, and of the way that mining has made us and our communities what they are, we have to go back a bit.

Not just to the first coal mines on the banks of the Tyne, but a but further.

To be exact a little bit over 500,000,000 years ago, give or take a few stray millennia.

Then England was not an offshore island near to France, but sited somewhere near the South Pole. Scotland, my Caledonian pals will be pleased to hear was nowhere near, bobbing somewhere just south of the Equator, which probably meant a boom time for the ancestors of today's highland midges.

In both those locations cataclysmic events occurred over the eons. The movement of tectonic plates erupted mineral bearing rocks to the surface. Later, in the Carboniferous period, a warm shallow sea deposited around its shores vast quantities of calcium carbonate from the remains of plankton, eventually forming the limestone that is seen in many parts of Britain. This provided the organic material for giant forests of ferns and softwood trees - which in their turn became beds of coal. The salt deposits from that sea also evaporated under a sun much harsher that we can imagine, leaving both salt, and near to home, potash beds.

It was this physical history which gave rise to this remarkable story of British Mining over the past three thousand years, an activity which in turn shaped our social history for ever.

It begins with flint mining to allow stone age hunter gatherers survive the cusp of the last ice age, a mining technology that developed into the winning of the tin, copper and lead that powered the bronze age and lead to the beginnings of a market economy across the nation and abroad.

The book is strong too, on the development of the technology that allowed for the winning of these ores. Mines were getting deeper - some tin mines in Cornwall were hitting depths of 600 feet by the 1700's, which meant the need for mechanical ways of getting the ore and the miners up and down from the rock face to the open air, and also to both ventilate and pump the mines clear of water. Thus was born the steam age.

Some of these developments are still remarkable in today's world. Take the great adits which drained mines as far apart as Teesdale and Truro. One, in Cornwall, the Great County Adit, was 38 miles long, draining 13 million gallons a day from 40 mines into the sea.

Indeed if UK mining has a home it is Cornwall. Cornish miners, shaft sinkers and engineers were the pioneers who opened minefields across the UK. If you want proof look just look at the phone directories in any old mining area and see where the Treloars, Tregonnings and Agars live. In most cases they are usually not more than a few miles from the pits they sunk and oversaw back in the past centuries.

It was, of course coal mining that shaped today's nation. From Kent to Lanarkshire and from Somerset to South Yorkshire, they formed the nation's largest and most strategically important occupational group.

The coalowners, a group of individuals that few, if any, words of praise can be find for, were the `shock capitalists' of their time, pioneering the `vertical integration' of coal mining with the industries that relied on the output and muscle of the pitmen (and women) - shipbuilding, iron and steel and railways.

Mining killed. A pick striking metal, an electric spark or an accident with a lamp could set off the methane, sometimes killing hundreds at a time. In Sengenhydd, South Wales, in 1913 no fewer than 436 men and boys were killed in the worst mining disaster in Britain, whilst nearer home over 200 men were lost well within living memory in Easington in 1953.

But mining, mining communities and miners and their families shaped today's social world. It was the miners who were the backbone of the Trade Union movement and the union's political child, the Labour Party of the 1900's. It was, in turn, the miners consequent abandonment of their former Liberal faith marked the effective end of that party at least in its original form.

We could not have won the last war without our miners. Their work was deemed so vital to the war effort that their ranks were supplanted by conscripts drawn at random from across the UK. Thus, Oxford graduates and London office workers found themselves in Durham pit villages or in the deep valleys of the Merthyr Vale, an experience that, along with military conscription, led to the welcome and long overdue death of many of the pre war class attitudes that scarred society.

Coyle ends by posing the question of whether, as most people would lazily suppose, mining has no future in our country. On this he is of the belief that it is not an industry on which the sun has finally set. In a globalised economy where commodity prices can fluctuate wildly, and where many minerals like copper and the `rare earths' without which our mobile phones and plasma TV's cannot work, UK minerals can be seen as a national strategic reserve, and, coming full circle, he hails the news that a new Tin Mine is shortly to come on line in the Cornish ancestral heartland.

If I have one regret, it that he tells the story of UK mining without references to what is happening in the rest of the world and how it affected us here. Globally, the negatives of mining are still with us, and it is possible that the most dangerous occupation in the world is to be a pitman in today's China.

Indeed, as I type this, the streamer across the bottom of my Sky TV news channel tells us of a mine explosion and many deaths. For Easington read East Asia, for Sengenhydd read Shanxi province. The world of the miner still has resonance and will certainly shape those new societies in the future as profoundly as our own.

David Walsh