Old mine cart on track emerges from cliff face
WALKERS enjoying their daily exercise at a beach in Cornwall have recently been noticing a strange object jutting out of the cliff.
Like a fossilised scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, what looks like an old mine cart on rails appears to be emerging from the rock face, 40ft up from the sand.
In fact, this wagon, which is probably close to 100 years old, is a rusty remnant from an ambitious operation to extract tin-rich sand from Gwithian beach, near Hayle, between the First and Second World Wars.
Although it has perched on the side of a cliff since the tin sand works closed in the late 1930s, a precarious clear-up of vegetation covering the cart two years ago, combined with some more recent cliff erosion, has made it more visible than it has been for decades. The Gwithian Tin Sand Works shut down just over 80 years ago at the beginning of the Second World War, but it is safe to assume that the cart in the cliff is closer to 100 years old, as it would have been part of the operation for many years before the closure.
This unexpected slice of history at Gwithian can be added to an evergrowing list of obscurities emerging from the three-mile stretch of sand, which already includes a Victorian shipwreck, a 30-year-old Land Rover, and a mysterious road to nowhere in the middle of the beach.
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