16. Dawn Of A New Age, Pendeen, Cornwall
Neil Oliver: News, Comment, History
Fat Belly Films
4.7 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2020
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week’s podcast we travel with Neil across the British Isles into the Bronze Age, investigating the metal alloy that would transform the human species.
The ancient world knew Cornwall as one of the richest sources of tin on the planet. And in the Bronze Age tin was in demand, because it is one of the two metals, along with copper, needed to make the new 'wonder' alloy, bronze. Neil takes us to Geevor tin mine on the incredibly beautiful Cornish coast exploring how this part of the British Isles played its part in helping to create the weapons, tools, jewellery and artworks that powered the world’s Bronze age.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The 15 million pound Lotto Super Saturday jackpot must be won this Saturday. |
| 0:04.5 | Or thousands of you will win a share of the prize. |
| 0:06.7 | But who will it be? |
| 0:07.7 | Maybe Raj, watching the racewalk and thinking I could do that. |
| 0:10.6 | Well speed walk down the shop and get yourself a ticket. |
| 0:13.1 | Lotto will you be next play in store or on app the national lottery account terms |
| 0:17.6 | rules and procedures apply players must be 18 or over. It's the same landscape. It's made of the same stuff and the casserite is still there woven through the rock just as the history is woven |
| 0:37.1 | through our understanding of the place. In this week's podcast we're setting foot in a new age, an age powered by a beautiful new |
| 0:50.0 | metal, bronze, used for war and peace. To make it you needed a rare ingredient found in these islands. |
| 1:01.7 | And three and a half thousand years ago at least the world came |
| 1:06.4 | knocking and the British Isles began trading. |
| 1:25.0 | I'm stepping out across Britain to discover 100 remarkable places that have shaped you, me and the whole world. I'm Neil Oliver and this is my with you to the Welsh Atlantis and the legend of |
| 1:41.1 | Cantru Guilod. Where's the next stop on our journey? |
| 1:45.0 | Well, this week we're heading to a place that has history woven into its cliffs, |
| 1:51.0 | a place that became an important cog in the developing Bronze Age, one of the |
| 1:57.2 | richest sources of tin in the entire world. It's Cornwall. The Gever Tin Mine in Pendine in Cornwall. It's quite unusual in the context of the hundred places because |
| 2:15.0 | well giver tin mine is quite modern. It was in the late 1700s really before anyone started extracting tin there But the story of Cornish tin is ancient and I chose Giva I did a little bit of filming at Giva Tenmine. In fact, I've filmed there a couple of times because it survived as a working British Tenmine until late in the day right up into the 1990s when the price of tin |
| 2:47.9 | fell globally and the costs basically of keeping the mine open. It just became uneconomical and so it closed down then. |
| 2:56.0 | But it's still, it functions as a tourist attraction and you can go down the shafts and go into the chambers and you can see what it was like. |
| 3:07.0 | And frankly it's a fright. |
| 3:09.0 | You know, to think that people in the 1990s were working in those sorts of conditions, which they look quite Victorian in a way. |
| 3:16.0 | With the rocks dripping wet, confined spaces, you know you can hear the sea. |
... |
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