Cornwall is a long, hilly peninsula at the western foot of England where people have dug the ground for thousands of years. If there ever was one, the Cornish folk are a people of the Earth. First of all they are Celts, but they also have a long and illustrious history of mining.
The ancients knew about the mines of Cornwall for copper but even more so for their tin, easily smelted from cassiterite (tin oxide). This mineral is very heavy and fairly hard, so it forms placers in the streambeds where it erodes from Cornish granites. Cassiterite is easily smelted in a hot fire to yield high-purity tin.
So what? Tin is not a familiar metal today, except among technologists. What made tin a strategic material in ancient times is that just a little bit mixed in molten copper produces a hard, tough alloy—bronze. Used in weapons, in farm tools, in armor and hinges and smithwork, bronze gave its owners a competitive edge. Bronze made such a difference to civilization that it lifted us out of the Stone Age into the Bronze Age.
So the peoples of Cornwall, whether they were the aboriginal Britons who built the likes of Stonehenge or the Celtic tribes who displaced them before Roman times, paid a great deal of attention to the land around them. And as in most of Europe, extremely old Earth-related traditions lingered in Cornwall from Stone Age times.
There were the standing stones called dolmens, for instance. Perhaps these monuments were inspired by the erratic boulders that Ice Age glaciers dropped behind them, perched on hilltops and other unlikely places. But the early Europeans did nature one better by quarrying and moving very large stones into precise arrangements, for purposes we cannot be sure of today. In Cornwall in more recent Celtic times, these stone monuments were seen as centers of mystical earth energy that regulated the health of the land. Seasonal rituals centered around them, marking significant dates in the yearly cycle and centering the community in ceremony.
The Christian church could not erase these pagan rites until the stones themselves were scattered and churches built in their place. But many are still left, and much has not been forgotten. A retired Cornish miner named Ed Prynn has created an intriguing "stone henge" on his land near St. Merryn, breathing fresh life into the old local stone traditions.
Other traditions had to do with springs and wells. Not least because clean water is essential to health, water sources were cared for with reverence. And when Christian practices came to Cornwall, the church priests associated many ancient wells with saints and holy men instead of the Celtic sacred personages.
Cornwall has produced tin for thousands of years, first from the stream deposits, then from the ore in the hills. The Roman empire, and later the English and Normans, occupied the region and worked the mines with imported miners or local men. Among the foreign workers were Saxons from central Europe, bringing with them their expertise and their supernatural beliefs.
Underground miners work in danger and darkness, where the air is foul and the footing is slippery, in search of scattered pockets of rich ore. In conditions like these that put so much outside human control, the mind naturally seeks help from signs and visions, even hallucinations. These reasons are a fair explanation for the widespread belief in the little men who live in mines. The Cornish miners, already used to the little folk called fairies or piskies, readily adopted the Saxon traditions and named the imps of the mines "knockers." These confusing, sometimes malevolent creatures have a very long history in European folklore.
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