The Knockers: The Helpful Spirits of the Cornish Tin Mines
Cornwall is a country with two landscapes: the granite moors and sea-cliffs above, and below them, mile upon mile of hand-cut darkness—the deepest, oldest metal mines in Britain, worked for tin from the Bronze Age until living memory, some levels running out under the very floor of the Atlantic, where men labored listening to the boulders grinding in the surf over their heads. In that lower country, the Cornish miner was never alone, and knew it. Sharing the darkness with him were the Knockers —the small people of the mines: about two feet high, dressed like tiny tinners with boots and tool-bags, aged and whiskered of face, never (or almost never) seen, but heard , constantly, everywhere, at the very edge of lamplight. Their name is their signature: the knocking—tap-tap, tick-tock, the sound of small picks working unseen lodes—came through the rock in the stillness between a man's own blows; and on the meaning of that knocking the miner's fortune, and often his life, depended....