Victorian Times

We went to Mowellham Quay today. It was a place where you could see things from the olden days and people were dressed up. It used to be a Victorian mining town.

Kids from 8 and older needed to work in the mine but girls worked on top of the mine sorting out the rocks.


First we went on a train into the mine. It was incredibly dark. We learnt about the different ways to collect copper. it was very dangerous.

The mine stopped because people found mines in other countries and more copper came from places like Australia. When Mowellham stopped mining copper they started to produce arsenic. It is very dangerous and it was used for things like killing insects on crops to stop them eating them.

We made some ropes. We had to play tug of war with the rope to straighten it. It was a draw.


We went to school. I had to wear a dunce's hat. Only me and Zill got playtime because we were the only people who remembered a rhyme.


We saw the house of the assayer who experimented on the rocks. We also saw a demonstration and saw lots of different stones like fools gold. We held a copper bar. It was very heavy.


We rode in a horse and cart. The horse's name is Prince. He is 6 years old and us an English Shire Horse. We also saw a man making horse shoes, a cooperage where they made barrels and a miner's cottage. I thought in my head how could people live like that.


We tried on some clothes from the Victorian times. Then we went to the Edwardian farm. We saw some tables that looked like toadstools and some sheep and horses.


Then we saw the wooden ship in the Quay.