I've heard that, Mark. The only mine I 've been down had a gift shop attached. (That was enough for me. Granite leaks, you know; so as well as being bent double in total lack of light apart from a candle, cold water is more than dripping over you all the time. And there are some unpleasant things dissolved in it from lodes, which wouldn't do you any good over a period. I went to the lowest level - to be told later that was still the upper levels - it went deeper and narrower many times that depth - hundreds of feet. The pity was that they had renamed this place, at Wendron, from whatever it had been to Poldark Mine, after the Winston Graham novels)

I think that sweet / savoury story was, if true, of the more affluent, though it wasn't necessarily apparently more work or cost... Availability and purchaseability of materials does come into it But there was intense poverty here. One still gets a sense of some of it walking around and inferring from ruins - soil floors, pressed earth walls, one up one down with a ladder only often, tiny, no internal plumbing. And that was well off.

There's a book called - I think - Tremedda Days... This concerns as I recall the daughter of the family that occupied the house (forgotten the name - Talland House?) occupied by V Woolf, still here, from which she viewed the lighthouse she moved nominally to Scotland...Said daughter, clearly of  prosperous circumstances, decided she was in want of a trad Cornish farm. They sent her to Italy for a year to make her normal and she came home unchanged. So they bought her a small farm to teach her a lesson and in due course she married a farmer, combined farms, made babies with this guy who hardly ever spoke in public, kept the farm going, appeared entirely content with the farm and her family... Died without public trace beyond one small part of west penwith

The book tells the story in so far as its known such as it is. A few facts, a few photos. D H Lawrence, one time local, might have done something with it, by way of an imaginary turbuilent passionate internal life; but there's precious little history

Anyway I mention it because of the social and geographical incidentals. One labourer in particular appeared to live in something not that different to a prehistoric burial cyst - a few stones in place added to and a bit of timber. That was his home...

Of course industry brought improvements as well as being the cause of the need for improvements - particular workers attracted by the offer of then modern housing etc.; - tho internal WCs have clearly been added on where I am - built for railway builders in the 1870s - and by the time all industry was collapsing there was some welfare... Nevertheless, even before then, this area had the highest 19th century emigration of anywhere in europe, numeric or percentage - some would have been in the hope of riches primarily; but most was because life was economically intolerable

I think for the most of the agricultural population life was pretty dire by our reckoning - even those with work at Holman's, the engineers, developing out of Trevithick's inventing, and the big mines, it's the old story. A few owners getting rich. Same with the fishing on which St Ives grew. And it all went wrong in about half a century - in a quarter of a century, Scilly - the poorest inhabitants without adequate means before economic development having been removed to a mainland poorhouse - built up a little industry servicing and chandlering the boats from America, still the best place I know to buy interesting rope and cord -  while news came from Penzance about the best mainland port to go to; and on the back of that a boat-building industry. Then came radio, and Scilly was bypassed except as a small and pointless garrison. And my grandad went to London; and his brother to Canada. Multiplied by the number of families

Oh dear. You only asked about sweet and savoury. I am in elegiac mode. My tenure of this space is ending soon and I have no immediate solution... Exit to packing pursued by regrets

Do try saffron cake


L


  -----Original Message-----
  From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
  To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
  Date: Friday, March 10, 2006 10:09 PM
  Subject: Re: help--translation query


  Lawrence: I read somewhere, or maybe Robin H or David B told me, that 
  the pasties the miners took below often had two pocyhes, one for the 
  savory, one for the sweet. Equally healthy, I'd suspect.