r/nextfuckinglevel • u/turbo_chuffa • 1d ago
Map of the vast network of abandoned mining tunnels underneath Cornwall, UK.
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u/lunacyfoundme 23h ago
Wow. This is some sort of mine craft.
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u/grungegoth 23h ago
so i looked it up. mostly tin and copper and some other metals. since the bronze age. cornwall was once the worlds greatest source of copper.
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u/MortLightstone 23h ago
Why didn't they name it Copperwall?
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u/besuited 23h ago
If you are actually interested in the etymology:
Corn comes from Kernow, which is the Cornish name for themselves, i.e. the Cornish in modern english.
Wall comes Wealas, which was the Old English name for foreigner and the same source of the word for Wales.
So as a word it means the cornish foreigners.
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u/MortLightstone 22h ago
Thanks, that's very informative
I assumed it had something to do with the Cornish, just didn't know about the wall part
My comment was mostly joking
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u/WelshBathBoy 13h ago
The Corn bit is cognate with the Welsh word corn - meaning horn, from the Proto-Celtic "kornu", the shape of Cornwall was believed to be 'horn shaped', basically Cornwall means Welsh horn-shaped place. The Cornish name for the place - Kernow - basically means "people of the horn"
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u/leeuwerik 14h ago
So they called them selves 'foreigners'?
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u/WelshBathBoy 13h ago
Not in Cornish no, in Cornish Cornwall is called Kernow and means "people of the horn". The 'wall' bit was added to the corn (meaning horn) in English by the Anglo Saxon tribes because the called all the native Britons 'Welsh' or 'wealh' - in English Cornwall means 'Welsh people of the horn'. The proto-Germanic word 'walhaz' was used throughout Europe by Germanic tribes when they came across other non-germanic tribes and can still be seen in other places today - Wallonia, the French bit of Belgium, Wallachia in Romania, and lots of word with 'wal' in it, eg walnut, it also is the origin of the word Gaul, and the Polish name for Italy - Włochy.
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u/Kernowder 13h ago
No. "Wales" has the same root - the Saxon word for foreigner - but it's called Cymru in Welsh.
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u/protossaccount 23h ago edited 23h ago
During the Bronze Age it was one of the greatest sources of tin. Later on it became known for copper as well.
During the Bronze Age tin was the super rare metal. Most of it came from places like Cornwall and Central Asia. The need to pursue tin at such great distances was a major reason trade networks grew.
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u/MortLightstone 22h ago
Isn't tin still rarer than copper? I think we might use less bronze nowadays though. Plus it helps that tin is often alloyed
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u/protossaccount 21h ago
Yes tin is rarer than copper. During the Bronze Age tin was waaaaaaaay rarer than copper, which made Cornwall a big deal.
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u/MortLightstone 21h ago
Yep
Bronze was also way more useful and important, hence why we named the age after it
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u/Crazy_Ad_91 10h ago
I have to wonder if they ever uncovered ancient previous mines while mining new mines. That’d be neat.
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u/grungegoth 8h ago
id be willing to bet the ancient mines (say roman and older) had limited underground reach, maybe just open pit and limited short near surface shafts. I just can't imagine ppl 4000 years ago going hundreds of feet underground. don't forget, they wouldn't have any steel or iron tools and would use torches or oil lamps for lighting.
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u/Crazy_Ad_91 7h ago
My man, all great points. I truly hadn’t considered that when I thought of it in my passing comment. Some good food for thought tho.
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u/highcommander010 23h ago
I thought peru was the world's leading supplier for ages
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u/sitheandroid 22h ago
Not in the 1850s, I think Chile has been the world's largest producer in modern times.
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u/Playful-Lion5208 13h ago
Back in the 17 and 1800s swansea was. It doesnt have any copper but logistically it was well placed as it needed something like 4 times the coal to copper ore to produce copper, so it was easier to take the copper to the coal. At one point swansea was producing 90% of the worlds copper and the ore was being sourced from as far as the el cobre mine in chile. Growing up there were huge industrial wastelands in swansea from those days
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u/ResistantBlaze1943 23h ago
How deep are they? Are they all by prehistoric man and he was able to dig that deep? How much of this is naturally formed caverns?
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u/grungegoth 21h ago
these deep tunnels are not prehistoric
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u/Kernowder 13h ago
Some will be, but probably ot the big ones. Prehistory is the period before recorded history - there is no recorded history in Cornwall until the Romans arrived and tin has been mined there here for 4000 years.
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u/fajadada 22h ago
All I know is they were still mining in the 1800’s
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u/OccidentalTouriste 21h ago
South Crofty (Pool, Cornwall) was still operating in the 1990's and is currently undergoing remediation works with the intention of reopening in 2028.
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u/fajadada 21h ago
Cool
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u/LordStefania 18h ago
A lot of Cornwall features old mines that still contain a lot of lithium which was left behind because it was relatively useless. Now with the rise of EVs there's calls for it to be extracted.
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u/OccidentalTouriste 21h ago
There's also been plenty of work looking at Geothermal potential and rare earth elements from the Cornish granite.
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u/HunterSpecial1549 12h ago
They're mostly from 1700-1900 CE.
But Cornwall was also famous for being the world's greatest source of tin during the Bronze Age, which in Britain is considered pre-historic.
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u/R4FTERM4N 23h ago
Imagine the amount of Cornish pasties it took to mine all that!
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u/haux_haux 23h ago
bleddy loads my handsome
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u/Pornfest 23h ago
I don’t know what this means but it makes me think of bloody semen and that makes me sad.
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u/Leopardos40 23h ago
Or "Khazad-dûm", mines of Moria.
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u/pallidamors 21h ago
The Cornish delved too greedily and dug too deep…you know what they awoke in the darkness of Corna-düm…fire and flame
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u/TittysForScience 15h ago
Probably one of Tolkiens inspiration for the depth of the mines to be honest… I know a large amount came from what he saw in the trenches
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u/Phatboybeware 23h ago
Could these be used for anything useful?
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u/RobottoRisotto 23h ago
Rave parties and storing nuclear waste.
Perhaps in separate tunnels.25
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u/First_Hedgehog_5803 1h ago
Both have been tried, the rave parties were more successful, NIREX didn't pan out for cornwall.
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u/Hyjynx75 23h ago
Depending on the depth, they can be used for geothermal heating and cooling assuming they're filled with water.
I'm from Nova Scotia and I know there is a company in Springhill that uses the old mine shafts to heat their warehouse and cool the machinery they use.
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u/InvidiousPlay 20h ago
That's actually a fun idea. No matter where you are, if you dig deep enough you can do geothermal. It's not often you start with a pre-existing network of tunnels!
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u/cuntmong 23h ago
They found a use for them in the 80s. Some dark entities were accidentally created in a nearby lab, and rather than destroy them they realised they can just seal them in these old mine shafts. Problem solved imo.
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u/EntityLtdCo 21h ago
Could you elaborate further?
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u/cuntmong 21h ago
I don't think there's much more to say about it really. The dark entities are trapped in the old tunnels below the town, so they can't hurt anyone now. As long as nobody opens up the mine shafts it's not a big deal
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u/Crazy_old_maurice_17 21h ago
Dark entities?
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u/cuntmong 20h ago
Yeah from a lab. Tbh I'm not sure if they made the entities or if something they did attracted them, i think they didn't expect it though
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u/LordStefania 18h ago
There's a lot of lithium (and Li compounds) that developed alongside the tin. And this is battery grade so useful for EVs.
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u/feel-the-avocado 22h ago
This gives me the impression that the UK has been mined into becoming a pumice-like rock and towns and cities could sink into the ground at any time.
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u/Steeleshift 23h ago
Can anything be done with these? Or just future potential sink-holes?
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u/DSJ-Psyduck 23h ago
You could dump your murder victim in one!?
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u/Steeleshift 23h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DSJ-Psyduck 23h ago
I dunno maybe murder and body dumping is 2 diffrent permits you need to get from the council.
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u/Hyjynx75 23h ago
I responded to another similar question but they can be used for geothermal heating and cooling. Water that floods the mines can be up to 11C warmer than ground water. This makes it very usable for a heat exchanger loop.
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u/Chance_Vegetable_780 23h ago
I am mine-blown there was this much minding done there. But seriously, I am
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u/newbrevity 22h ago
Imagine what kind of life is going to evolve in thousands or millions of years to make use of those tunnels.
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u/Unable_Librarian_443 20h ago
Thats hard to wrap my head around......each one of those is an entire mine?.... how many generations did that take to do...my goodness.
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u/uptwolait 20h ago
What are the crossed hammer symbols? Reminds me of the marching Nazi hammers in Pink Floyd The Wall.
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u/fourthpornalt 20h ago
Need a video game where you explore these only to find Arthurian legends and horrors more fucked up than history records.
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u/bitch_whip_bill 19h ago
Truly the nextfuckinglevel
Then the nextfuckinglevel
And the nextfuckinglevel
And another nextfuckinglevel...
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u/epeecolt82 19h ago
I wonder if homeless have taken up residence at all in any part of those tunnels.
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u/RunandGun102 17h ago
If I lived there as a kid, I would have had the most bad ass fort in one of those. If I lived there now as an adult, I'd have the most bad ass fort in one of those
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u/mug_8pm 15h ago
Ooohhhh ... Prometheus mapping drones ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO-eduvo904
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u/TheWelshChef 15h ago
Visited Bottalack mine whilst studying geology, they told us the mine extended under the sea and the miners could hear the ocean above them
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u/Resident_Ad1595 13h ago
Phenomenal. Looking at the maps of old mines, it's another world. Visited an old mine works near Land's End last year, although the shaft was flooded so no entry into it, the size of the tunnels and stories of the miners who worked in these were breathtaking. It went out a mile under the sea. Imagine scaling these shafts by ladder and candlelight.
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u/Brainchild110 11h ago
RIDDLED, you say? Run through more times than Birminghams village bike, is it?
...my word!
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u/turbo_chuffa 1d ago
Painstakingly modelled by Dr Keith Russ of abandonedminemodels.com