Geevor Tin Mine, Penzance, Cornwall

Visible for mile after mile from the road towards Geevor, the gaunt remnants of Cornwall's mining heritage crowd the landscape and command our attention. These iconic stone buildings with arched openings and tall chimney stacks once housed steam engines to service the deep tin and copper mines.

Geevor Tin Mine today is from a later era, with a headframe that would not look out of place in County Durham. Well signposted from the nearby village of St Just, Geevor communicates an workmanlike honesty from the outset.

Descending from the car park, visitors are left in no doubt that this is an industrial site: functional sheds cluster around the steel head frame of Victory Shaft, silhouetted against the Atlantic.

Named in the wake of the Great War, it was sunk in 1919 to lift men and ore from a depth of 480 metres. Its wheels turned for the last time in 1990, having ground on for five years after the price of tin collapsed in 1985.

The entrance to the mine is through a small, half-glazed door to a building that looks like the site hut - after all, where else would a visitor report?

Close to the reception counter are bins with hard hats, which we are instructed to wear throughout our visit. A short office corridor leads to a door that opens onto the main site, part of which is only accessible when accompanied by a guide.

For the one o'clock tour, our guide is Dave, who worked at Geevor as a stoper. He is one of a small band who are arguably Geevor's greatest asset. Theirs are the authentic voices of Cornwall's mining tradition.

A stoper's job was to work upwards from the horizontal levels, breaking ore from the ceiling along the line of the metalliferous seam or lode in the granite. Dave is a skilled communicator who has clearly adapted well to his new role.

Local knowledge

In a series of huge sheds where ore was reduced to a fine, sandy concentrate, the interlacing conveyor belts and elaborate, almost Heath Robinson-style array of wooden structures, shaking tables and grinders have a delicacy that belies the tonnage of rock processed here.

It is also uncannily quiet: an abandoned scene more reminiscent of one of those impossible architectural fantasies of Piranesi than the ear-shattering racket of incessant movement it once was.

And here we bump up against that thorny old question of authenticity that haunts such sites. Health, safety and sheer economics make public access to a "real" experience impossible. Dave paints the word picture, fills the gaps and kindles the willing imagination.

Later, I ask his colleague, Alan, who takes us underground, how he views this sanitised, tidily packaged version of the dirty, dangerous business of mining. His answer was unequivocal: better to pass on the narrative of his industry in this form than let it be forgotten.

Back on the surface we are free to wander unescorted through a range of 20th-century industrial buildings that reassuringly say, "visitors please enter" at the door. Informative panels explain clearly the functions of the winding engine and the compressors that powered the rock drills underground.

In the union office, if you look hard, you'll learn that the Cornish miner was not an employee, but a sub-contractor paid for what he produced.

Housed in the refurbished Top Fitting Shop, a section of the museum called Hard Rock uses models, rock and mineral specimens, artefacts, video and graphics to explain local geology, Cornish mining heritage and social history. A small cinema shows a film of the mine when it was in production.

Upstairs, interactives designed to explain how the ore was processed are not half as engaging as Dave and Alan's personal narratives. There is also a small temporary exhibition gallery, displaying a series of "then and now" photographs of the mine. One shows a silver band: I wonder whether that has survived the closure.

In one corner, I found what I had been missing. Heavily disguised within an oversized pilchard tin are the recorded voices of people who worked at Geevor. Sitting in this tiny space, the visitor can listen to personal but anonymous stories. They - and we - surely deserve better than this?

This exhibit should be dismantled, completely rethought and replaced with a major installation, providing visitors with the chance to choose whom to "meet" face-to-face, with named photographs and occupations displayed. And there is only one place to put it: at the human heart of Geevor, the Dry.

Dry tales

The Dry is a long, single-storey building that contains row upon row of lockers, with showers, basins and places for drying out sopping wet clothing. The lockers are open and draped with clothes, towels, footwear and stickers.

Suspended in time, it is eerily moving, its atmosphere freighted by hard-earned human lives, ringing with the muscular banter of survival. Placed in corridors are rows of close-up photographs of the men who moved through these rooms between the mine and their homes.

Cornwall is a county that has always made the best of its resources and it has been inventive in overcoming the problems of geographical isolation. Tourism is now an important part of the local economy.

The mining heritage of the county, from the Tamar to Zennor, was accorded World Heritage Site status by Unesco in 2006, a designation that recognises the international significance of Cornwall's mining history and its technological impact worldwide.

Geevor tells an important part of that local, global story, one that fuelled a diaspora driven by economics, expertise and enterprise. Tales of livelihoods created and destroyed by global boom and bust are familiar in Cornwall.

Geevor plays its part honestly and without frills. It has spent £3.8m wisely on restoring and reinterpreting the site. Its challenge is to be sustainable in the long term. Giving due expression to the voices of the men and women who made it all possible will broaden its appeal.

Tristram Besterman is an adviser on museums and cultural issues