Our Saturday morning email features the very best news and exclusive content from our team of reporters Sign me up! Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Invalid Email

A 40ft deep mineshaft has opened up in a car park in a residential area of St Ives.

Emergency services were called after the massive hole appeared in Garth an Creet on Saturday evening.

It's believed the tarmac had been starting to drop for several weeks, but the hole opened up at around 4pm on Saturday.

Police were called to the scene, along with emergency workers from Cormac and a volunteer team from Cornwall Search and Rescue to assess the hole.

(Image: Clive Oxley)

Jim Gallienne, from Cornwall Search and Rescue said they arrived on site at around 7.30pm with a mine specialist to look into the hole.

He said: "It's a big hole. It's deceptive. The opening is only a metre or metre and half across. The tarmac on the surface is floating and there's a mineshaft underneath that drops about 40ft.

"A lot of the mine workings that we find ourselves working with are between 100 and 150 years old and it doesn't take a lot of changes in the way the water is permeating through the ground or a heavy lorry or something to open it up.

"This shaft was particularly close to the surface so it's fallen through.

(Image: Clive Oxley)

"Our job was to make an initial assessment of it and make sure there weren't any houses or anything else at risk of falling in.

"We've rigged up a safety line and assessed the edge of the opening to get an idea of whether there's tunnels leading off it. We've got a mining engineer who specialises in surveying mines and mine workings. He's made an assessment of it.

"A bit more tarmac will probably fall through but there's nothing there at the moment which gives us any cause to think other houses may be at risk but where there's one mine shaft there's often others.

(Image: Clive Oxley)

"Cormac are there and they're putting in a cordon around it and a couple of fences around the immediate hole and in a wider area to make sure the public are safe and it will be up to someone to claim it and get it repaired.

(Image: Google)

"From a safety perspective it's quite useful to show people the hole doesn't go anywhere. We're more than happy to tell people what it is and it's nothing.

"We don't normally get called out to jobs like this but because there was a public safety element they wanted someone to assess whether the wider public were at risk.

"The callouts for us are very very rare indeed but Cornwall is riddled with thousands of holes so it does happen all the time but not always in such close proximity to houses."

(Image: Google)

Local resident Clive Oxley was on the scene when the volunteers arrived.

He said: "The whole car park has been cordoned off and there's Cormac workers and police and mines rescue people everywhere. It's definitely a mineshaft."