One or two people have said to me recently that the DB is full of mines of little or no significance, existed for only a brief period of time, or even, from a mining point of view, didn’t exist at all.
At the moment I’m reading Barton’s “Tin Mining and Smelting in Cornwall” and parts of it are relevant to this discussion. Barton makes the point that around the 1860s such were the financial possibilities of mine promotion, as opposed to true mining, that a great number of existing setts of solid worth were sub-divided in order that ground might be sold to newly formed companies. Cutting a long story longer I’ll quote directly from the book on the Breage area.

“New or newly re-worked setts in the . Breage area were particularly numerous, largely on account of the current richness of the Wheal Vor company at Wheal Metal. In the mid-60's there were ' Metals' and ' Vors ' in profusion; Sithney Wheal Vor, Penhale Wheal Vor, West Wheal Vor-re-started for the second or third time in 1864-East Wheal Vor, New Vor & Metal United, Pellor Wheal Metal, New Wheal Vor and East Wheal Metal, and no less than two North Wheal Metals, one each in Breage and Sithney parishes. As if this crop was not sufficient to confuse investors, there was also the artfully named Great Wheal Metal Limited, floated in October 1864, whose only claim to greatness rested in its title”.

So out of interest I ran Vor (ignoring mines such as Peevor) through the mine search and then Metals. The following is the list.

Penhale Wheal Vor
Vor mixed mine .
Vor Carleen
Vor East
Vor Great East
Vor Great United
Vor New + East Metal
Vor New + Metal Utd
Vor North
Vor Sithney Ltd
Vor West a
Vor West b

Wheal Metal
Metal Great Ltd.
Metal North a
Metal North b
Metal Pellor
Metal Sithney
Metal West
Metal Work
Metal Work (old)
Metal and Flow

I’m not even totally sure which one is the great Wheal Vor. Just to round things off there are three Fatwork mines in the DB. I take it one of them is Carnebone Fatwork tin mine that was a failure and later was better known as East Wheal Lovell. One of the other Fatworks is in the channel. So my point is this causes an awful lot of confusion so do we need all of these mines or just the more relevant ones with perhaps more explanatory notes. I have to say the asylum beckons. Opinions on this are most welcome.
🙂

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"As if this crop was not sufficient to confuse investors,....."

It seems the original aim to confuse has succeeded, although not in any way as originally intended! :lol:

You are not wrong there! I've had to repost it as the two columns side by side merged just to make matters worse if that's possible. :lol:

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“I have to say the asylum beckons."
🙂

On that score Carnkie, just keep taking your medication, it seems to do you good 😉 . My take on this, having done some work on the FoD database is, firstly that I'm glad that the Forest mines didn't go quite as crazy in the duplication, or near duplication of names in order to engender an often false optimism when issuing a share issue. On the other hand such 'illusory mines' are an important partof the history of mining in this country and such 'scam mines' (IMHO) should be recorded. You are right that it can cause confusion but, over time the work of recording and sorting done by yourself and others is capable of becoming the definitive record to any person interested in mining history. The web site based format lends itself to the task. I guess I'm saying that the DB is a kind of focused wikipaedia.
In short I say, "keep up the good work" and when confusions arrise we can discuss what we know (or think we know) and, hopefully achieve a greater degree of clarity.

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