June 2025

Wheal Martyn is very lucky to have a talented and dedicated volunteer group that contributes tirelessly to supporting the china clay museum. In 2024, over 60 volunteers contributed a total of 1,001 days of voluntary work at Wheal Martyn in a whole range of roles including:

• meeting and greeting visitors
• supporting activities
• conserving collection items
• documenting archives
• supporting research and exhibition development
• vegetation clearance
• maintaining grounds
• helping in the café
• running thriving social prescribing and language groups
• organising and supporting a range of events.

The volunteers help to achieve much of the work and projects at the museum. For example, currently working alongside Andy Trudgian, our Maintenance Lead, many volunteers have contributed to extensive rhododendron clearance over the last 12 months, significantly enhancing the site and improving habits. Also our collections team continue ongoing important work to ensure the archive and objects are documented and research enquiries responded to.  

We are also fortunate to have some very talented artists in the volunteer team, who are currently displaying their own artwork in the 'Artists of Wheal Martyn' exhibition in the Roger Preston Gallery at Wheal Martyn. All work displayed within this exhibition is from dedicated members of the Wheal Martyn team, including tour guides, activity guides, grounds team and curatorial volunteers.

In the year ahead, we look forward to working with volunteers to carry out conservation work to monitor hoses, the mobile crane and other large objects in the museum grounds.

We will be recruiting volunteers to various new roles in the coming weeks and months and are looking to grow our team of volunteer guides. If this is something that interests you, please visit our Volunteering page to find out more.

And to all our current volunteers - we thank you - we absolutely couldn't do it without you!