We'll be damned - the background to the song :
This is a song about the Cornishmen who left Perranporth to sail the world to mine all sorts of minerals when the principal mines in the parish closed down.
The Cornish diaspora of the previous two centuries was a long and very variable process, depending on economic factors at home and abroad, and in many cases a sense of adventure and self-worth.
Not every miner left home because he had too - and in many cases they returned when things got better at home and often because they had made a lot of money abroad.
Of course, many travelled the world with their skills of hard rock mining and left an indelible impression on their adopted homes.
Cornish engine houses and Cornish names are found from Derbyshire to Australia.
In Perranporth, a coastal mining village in the parish of Perranzabuloe on the north coast of Cornwall, there were at the beginning of the 19th. century two huge copper mines, Wheal leisure and Perran St. George, and well as many smaller workings along the coast and inland.
As a result of a legal dispute, St. George stopped working, as did her pumps, resulting in the flooding of Wheal Leisure, who's pumps could not cope alone. Most of the population of Perranporth was put out of work, and these two mines never re-opened.
As can be seen from a photograph dated ? 1840 - or more probably a couple of decades later - the engine houses are roofless. Wheal Leisure was in the valley, and Wheal Perran St. George above on the cliffs.
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