Gwennap Pit, tucked away in the quiet lanes between Redruth and the former mining villages of Carharrack and St Day, is a trim and neatly circular grassy ampitheatre. It wasn’t always so. It took on its present form in 1807, when local Methodists reconstructed it as their own outdoor cathedral. Before then, the site was a chaotic cavity, a large disorderly pit squeezed between stony mine burrows and smoking engine houses, through which the lane from Redruth to Carharrack meandered.
However, this chasm provided a perfect location in which to address large crowds. And this is what John Wesley began to do in the later eighteenth century. Wesley made his first journey to Cornwall in 1743. He then visited Cornwall almost annually until his death in 1791, making his last visit to the Pit in 1789. His simple message of salvation through faith struck an immediate chord among a population seeking consolation in a world that was rapidly changing. The growth of copper mines, the prosperity of which flowed from anonymous and unpredictable price movements, added new uncertainties to the more familiar foes of weather and disease. People increasingly dependent on the mine for their wages sought spiritual solace in Wesley’s preaching.
In England, Methodism grew slowly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century through the teaching of devoted converts to small groups in barns and houses. In contrast, in Cornwall Methodism grew in sudden spurts of excitable revivalism. These usually involved emotional outdoor mass meetings, accompanied by histrionic moanings and hot fanaticism. Gwennap Pit, now so calm and orderly, is in fact a monument to that earthier, more basic, more public and primitive Methodism in Cornwall – appealing to passion as much as reason.