Penzance Convention 008 Robin Mackay

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Thanks very much. I'm very excited to have been given the opportunity to assemble a really stellar selection of speakers for you today. So we're going to be trying to tackle this question of extraction and to a certain extent trying to define what we mean by extraction from essentially five very different points…

• 00:03:34

  The arsenic works at Bizzo, where arsenic was extracted from mine waste as a secondary product. And the once busy port of Deveren were now completely dormant, where wood would come in from Norway to build mine props, coal from Wales to fire the engines, and tin and copper would go out in massive quantities…

• 00:09:28

  Now, as I mentioned in relation to the Falmouth trip, following the primary extraction, that is the search for tin and copper, of course it makes economic sense to develop secondary industries to utilise what's left to make lemons into lemonade, or to make deads into quarry. And Hadrian gave a fantastic example…

• 00:11:49

  So in this sense, humankind becomes a kind of geological force in its own right, reprocessing and churning the planet. Shifting materials both in depth and across the surface, man lives not only in his contemporaneous time, but enters geological time. So we corrupt this file system in a way whose result geologists…

• 00:14:19

  And this certainly happened in Cornwall. And in a sense we could say Methodism is a cult whose function was precisely to bind together again these communities that were taken apart by this new force that was tearing through the landscape. So when we realise that the landscape of Cornwall is the remains of this massive…

• 00:16:57

  Because since ancient times, the extraction of metals and mining has been associated with war. And mining has been spoken of as a kind of transgression against the divine order. So in the De Re Metallica, 1556, Agri-Cola has a fascinating discussion of this, in the first chapter. And he quotes the ancient sources…

• 00:20:07

  Now, very little has been written on the logic of this new process of extraction, but luckily enough, another member of my family in his research came across a volume that speaks about it with great precision. I think this text is particularly germane with respect to Cornwall, where there are now more tourist…

• 00:23:37

  And I think it's very important to say that probably we wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the enthusiasm and the hard work of historians who have made sure that there's a record of what happened during this incredible period of upheaval in Cornish history. We drew a great deal on his research in our original…