Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/228

 222 THE CORNWALL COAST like the Planguary of Redruth — an old-world amphitheatre, first used for sports and later for miracle-plays. The name means "place of play." It is now used for religious and other meetings. The moorland country here is barren and wind- swept, with disfigurations from mining ; and the dismal summit of Carn Kenidzhek is haunted with queer traditions. This is the " carn of the howling wind " or the " hooting cairn," covered with traces of the immemorial past and feared in old days as a special domain of evil spirits. About a mile westward is the old Botallack mine, perhaps the most famous in all Cornwall, which reached to the sea and considerably beyond ; it was long closed, and the decayed buildings had quite a romantic appearance on the wild, bare cliffs, but the revival of Cornish minings has brought a new activity. The old workings run for about a third of a mile below the sea, and it is said that the pitmen were often terrified by the roar of the waves above their heads, dashing the loose boulders of rock. But the great Levant mine, a little over a mile northward, runs for about a mile beneath the sea, being worked for tin, copper, and arsenic. Once, not many years since, the sea actually broke into its workings. This is mining, indeed, in all its grimmest reality, and the arsenic-working in particular has a bad effect on the miners. But it earns dividends. Pages might be written about the old miners' superstitions, but even underground these things have died out ; even the perils are now lessened by modern science. Yet at Wheal Owles, in 1892, eighteen men lost their lives through the flooding of the workings. Just beyond Levant is Pendeen Village, with a