The forboding shell of the Standardized China Clay Company Works treatment plant building is just about all that's visible of Belowda Beacon mine, which got its raw product from the beautifully named Belovely Bottoms.
You can choose your way in from a combination of a choice between field of hard looking cows, electric fence, water filled ditch or high barbed wire fence (for obvious reasons I won't say what I found easiest).
The steel and concrete building was probably constructed in 1912 but other records show it was built in 1908, although it seems that date has perhaps been confused with another company with similar name, The Standard Clay Works.
A number of things seemed to do for the company before its closure in 1924 (elsewhere I have seen this date as 1928) with the official reason being a lack of raw product but this seems strange because the hillside below hadn't been exhausted.
Other problems appear to be its distance from the industry heartland around St Austel, a lack of water source to the site to process the raw material, which also contained too much mica, and the fact too many new innovations were being used at the site. This linked to the idea that it was not even a real mine, but a development works for a German company, far from their competitors, fuelled by rumours that none of the workers seemed to know what the upper floor of the main building was used for. This also lead to stories of the mine being a front for espionage, with the German manager staying at the nearby Victoria Inn, along with the fact that production seemed irregular and sometimes as little as two bags of China clay would turn up at Roche Station for onward transport. Near the end of the works' life a single order of 300 tons was disastrously fulfilled by using the entire China clay supply at the works.
Inside the main buildings you can still see the mounts for the Bollinder and Petter oil engines which were both direct coupled to their generators. In the building next door were the four separator machines used to refine the China clay but I found this building so overgrown that I didn't get any worthwhile photos. Behind the buildings are the now flooded open cast mines.
After closing, locals took the metal window frames and unsuccessful attempts were more recently made to remove the RSJs.
I stopped in a nearby corner shop to ask if anyone knew more of what had happened since the mine closed, just as an elderly woman walked in who the owner described as a local who was sure to know. She told me it had been destroyed in the war, possibly by a bombing raid, but I found that theory unlikely due to its remote location.
The painting is a 1940 watercolour by Ruskin Spear called 'Derelict china clay works, Belowda Beacon, Roche', which was commissioned as a national project to record historic buildings already showing the site in ruins, and the map shows the buildings in the photos as 'treatment plant buildings'. after completing the research it does infact seem there may be more worth looking at than I saw on this first trip.
You can choose your way in from a combination of a choice between field of hard looking cows, electric fence, water filled ditch or high barbed wire fence (for obvious reasons I won't say what I found easiest).
The steel and concrete building was probably constructed in 1912 but other records show it was built in 1908, although it seems that date has perhaps been confused with another company with similar name, The Standard Clay Works.
A number of things seemed to do for the company before its closure in 1924 (elsewhere I have seen this date as 1928) with the official reason being a lack of raw product but this seems strange because the hillside below hadn't been exhausted.
Other problems appear to be its distance from the industry heartland around St Austel, a lack of water source to the site to process the raw material, which also contained too much mica, and the fact too many new innovations were being used at the site. This linked to the idea that it was not even a real mine, but a development works for a German company, far from their competitors, fuelled by rumours that none of the workers seemed to know what the upper floor of the main building was used for. This also lead to stories of the mine being a front for espionage, with the German manager staying at the nearby Victoria Inn, along with the fact that production seemed irregular and sometimes as little as two bags of China clay would turn up at Roche Station for onward transport. Near the end of the works' life a single order of 300 tons was disastrously fulfilled by using the entire China clay supply at the works.
Inside the main buildings you can still see the mounts for the Bollinder and Petter oil engines which were both direct coupled to their generators. In the building next door were the four separator machines used to refine the China clay but I found this building so overgrown that I didn't get any worthwhile photos. Behind the buildings are the now flooded open cast mines.
After closing, locals took the metal window frames and unsuccessful attempts were more recently made to remove the RSJs.
I stopped in a nearby corner shop to ask if anyone knew more of what had happened since the mine closed, just as an elderly woman walked in who the owner described as a local who was sure to know. She told me it had been destroyed in the war, possibly by a bombing raid, but I found that theory unlikely due to its remote location.
The painting is a 1940 watercolour by Ruskin Spear called 'Derelict china clay works, Belowda Beacon, Roche', which was commissioned as a national project to record historic buildings already showing the site in ruins, and the map shows the buildings in the photos as 'treatment plant buildings'. after completing the research it does infact seem there may be more worth looking at than I saw on this first trip.
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