CORNISH TIN, WELSH IRON, MIDLANDS COAL
BARCLAY, Arthur Kett.
‘Journal of a Tour through Cornwall and Wales 1826 by Arthur Kett Barclay’.
18 July–13 October 1826.
Manuscript on paper, 4to (240 x 200 mm), pp. [2], 139, [1 (blank)]; very neatly written in brown ink in a few different hands, 16–17 lines per page; several neat ink drawings within the text and to folding sheets following pp. 68 and 104; a four-page autograph letter signed from A. K. Barclay to William S. Fry of 26 August 1826 following p. 56; folding printed broadside ‘The grand Menai suspension bridge’ facing p. 80; 44 interleaved engraved views and plans (a few coloured, some mounted, 1 folding); a few light marks; very good in contemporary half sheep, marbled boards and endpapers; some worming and splitting to upper joint and wear to extremities; pencil note to p. 1 ‘copied by his mother’, to p. 39 ‘his own writing this page’; Bury Hill armorial bookplate to front pastedown.
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‘Journal of a Tour through Cornwall and Wales 1826 by Arthur Kett Barclay’.
A most interesting diary recording a tour of England and Wales undertaken by the twenty-year-old Arthur Kett Barclay in 1826, especially valuable for its descriptions of English and Welsh mining in the late Industrial Revolution.
Having arrived in Bath ‘cover’d with as thick a coat of dust as any mortal would not desire’ and toured Somerset, Barclay visited the Ting Tang mine in Cornwall, his description of which is accompanied by a drawing depicting the mine above and below ground: he dons miner’s garb, ‘then taking a lighted candle stick in a bit of wet clay we commenced our journey down the ladders, they are very steep and sometimes incline backward … sometimes we had to crawl upon our hands and knees and sometimes to slide along lying quite flat on the stomach, this is the worse part of it … we found some fine carbonates and arsenates of copper’. Impressing the miners by racing back to the surface in only twenty-five minutes, Barclay emerges ‘cover’d with dirt, tallow, and smoke, and I am sure no one knows the comfort of being clean who has not been as dirty as we were’. He subsequently visits the remarkable Botallack Mine (‘after having performed the requisite toilette we went below ground to the first level under the sea, and had the satisfaction of hearing the waves roar over our heads’), and the Carnon Valley tin stream works. There is a good account, both in the diary and in an enclosed letter, of Barclay and his friend Mervyn almost drowning while exploring a cave at Land’s End, (perhaps Nanjizal?) – ‘the sea came in so fast that the only choice seemed to die like men, or be drowned like dogs’. After attempting to climb, he is hauled up 150 feet by men with ropes, ‘very much bruised’; ‘I never before sat two hours naked on a rock looking the ugly monster death cooly … in the face’.
After arriving at Swansea on 28 August, Barclay visits the iron works at Neath (‘the most gratifying sight I have yet seen, for we beheld steam engines of every size’) and describes the making of tin plate, including a drawing of a blast cylinder and furnace. He is greatly impressed by the Cyfarthfa ironworks: ‘I am just returned from visiting the works in the dark, the sight is awfully grand, the whole atmosphere is inflamed in every direction by the cake fires, and the manufactory is pandemonium itself … the dreadful roaring of the blast, the whirl of machinery, the spirit like figures of the workmen dragging about masses of glowing iron in an atmosphere of lurid light is quite appalling’. Trips follow to an Aberystwyth lead smelting house (with two neat small diagrams) and to Parys Mountain mine (‘the neighbourhood of Paris [sic] mountain teems with metallic productions, iron pyrites abound in every direction beautifully crystalised in cubes’).
Leaving Wales on 25 September, Barclay heads to Birmingham to visit neighbouring coal mines (‘a man had been killed there today, but others were working under the same ledge part of which had fallen upon him’), and then the lime works at Dudley (‘we came to a canal on which we embarked and navigated the acherontic stream … the excavations are stupendous … the noise of the blasting was horrible, you seemed actually to feel the concussion, and the reverberations gave you the idea of their going through an infinity of passages’). Trips to various factories follow, including to papier-mâché and gun manufacturers.
While the strength of the journal lies in these accounts, the more touristic passages are certainly not without interest. There are visits to numerous Welsh castles, with a handsome double-page hand-drawn plan of Caernarfon Castle, to Devil’s Bridge, to Cadair Idris, to Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa), and to Bangor Bridge (‘it is in my opinion truly the eighth wonder of the world’). There are glimpses of humour too: of a meal at Llanbedr he writes, ‘we dined on such a compound as few can conceive, a large deep dish in which at one end was a quantity of a blackish leaking substance which proved to be poached eggs and at the [other] end a perfectly black hard mass which was bacon, under all a lake of stygean [sic] grease; we however eat it and found it as good as it looked’.
The interleaved engravings, picked up at tourist shops en route, include a fine folding etching by Batenham of Bridge Street in Chester.
The rare broadside on the newly opened Menai Suspension Bridge describes its construction, the opening ceremony on 30 January 1826, the tolls charged, and its dimensions, and features a woodcut of the bridge at the head.
