Roger Dettmer looks at the life and times of the Cornish beam engine - a magnificent example of Victorian engineering that helped transform 19th century Cornwall into the mining capital of the world. VIEWED ON a grey winter's day, the red brick and granite buildings of the East Pool Mine near Redruth in Cornwall have the melancholy charm befitting an industrial leviathan, incongruously beached alongside a supermarket car park. The immediate environs may be a little unprepossessing, but this grey-red assortment of buildings is home to Cornwall's largest surviving Cornish beam engine - an iconic piece of industrial design that, during the first half of the 19th century, transformed Cornwall from a sparsely-populated rural outpost into the world's most important centre for the deep mining of tin and copper.
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