Why there should have been such a proliferation of fraudulent mining companies in West Cork is impossible to ascertain at this remove. Fraudulent companies were common on the London stock exchange at the time. By the latter third of the nineteenth century as many as one sixth of the companies trading on the Exchange were fraudulent. Why West Carbery became a favourite location for those wishing to perpetrate these type of frauds is unknown. Certain characters appear in several different bubble companies but showing complicity or conspiracy without more evidence is impossible, at least for the criminal standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.

Between the year 1810 and 1850 the south west corner of Ireland was mined extensively for copper in at least twenty-two locations. Scattered visibly around the Mizen Peninsula are the skeletal remains of those mining operations from that period. There are the remains of other mining activity on the Mizen that are not so easy to see, in fact one has to know where to look to find them. These mining relics are pre-historic, Early to Middle Bronze Age.

The men who worked the pre-historic mines and, over three thousand years later, the more recent historic ones were looking for the same thing: copper, a metal that has been used by humans for thousands of years and is found in many forms. It is one of the few metals that occur in nature in a directly usable metallic form, which is probably why it was one of the first metals ever extracted from the earth for human use. It was the first metal smelted from sulphide ores, the first metal to be cast into shape using moulds and the first to be mixed with another metal to make an alloy: tin to make bronze and zinc to make brass.

If you would like to know more about the prehistoric and nineteenth century mining on the Mizen:

www.buythebook.ie/this-is-the-mizen/