In the heart of Cornwall lies a landscape unlike any other in Britain: the stark, white, terraced pyramids of the St Austell china clay district. At the centre of this industry for over a century has been the Goonbarrow China Clay Pit, a vast open-cast mine near Bugle. Unlike the deep, dark shafts of Cornwall’s famous tin and copper mines, Goonbarrow’s target was kaolinite, a soft white clay formed from the intense hydrothermal decomposition of the region’s granite bedrock. For generations, high-pressure water cannons have blasted the altered granite faces, washing away the valuable clay and, in the process, revealing the mineralogical treasures locked within the more resistant, unaltered sections of the rock.
