like it or not, Crofty have made a rod for their own back with this particular issue.
They are quite happy to play the "last remaining tin mine" card when it suits them, it seems. The headframe has long been one of the most prominent landmarks of the Camborne area, it symbolises a now-vanished era of large-scale employment conducting industrial-scale tin mining and unlike the engine houses dotting the landscape, that era is still well within living memory.
Frankly, if Crofty were to actually begin mining, to take up their past role as the main employer in the area, I'm sure they could dismantle the headframe and no-one would care less. They could probably re-fill the Red River with red crap, and resume the task of backfilling the whole Tregajorran area with tailings and no-one would bother them.
But the fact is that for over a decade, a wide range of things have been said by quite a few people, some of them prominent locally; promised dates have been announced, come and gone; acrimonious political in-fighting and legal skulduggery has been conducted semi-publicly, often to little identifiable purpose.
The headframe is Crofty's Camilla Parker-Bowles; it's the price they pay for public goodwill.
''the stopes soared beyond the range of our caplamps' - David Bick...... How times change .... oh, I don't know, I've still got a lamp like that.