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The initial sign the local man received of his situation was when a neighbor urgently banged on his front door and informed him his beloved Mini had fallen into a opening.

"I went out expecting a small pothole under a tire or something like that. But when I went out to take a look, I understood, oh, that truly is a proper hole," he explained.

His automobile had descended into a 3-metre wide gap, possibly caused by a mineshaft collapse, and McKenzie has endured 25 days stuck in a bureaucratic "nightmare" trying to determine how to extricate his Mini.

The Core Problem: Unregistered Property

The complication is that the land has no registered owner. The local council has stated it can't remove the barriers blocking off the hole until property rights had been established. "It's a bit of a nightmare," said McKenzie, 36, a self-employed designer. "There's bureaucracy at every turn."

McKenzie has lived in the neighborhood in Redruth for about a decade and actually has a parking space beside his house, but it is not wide enough to be useful so he started leaving his car outside a nearby bakery. He had checked with both the shop and the council that he wouldn't get a parking fine.

"I had finally reached a point like I was getting somewhere, I had a dependable small vehicle that was fuel-efficient and simple to keep on the road. It meant I could at last focus on trying to put money aside to take my child on her dream trip to Japan one day. She's always wanted to go."

The Incident and Aftermath

Then came that loud rapping on a Saturday in November. "The person next door was quite panicked. The officers turned up and closed the zone off. We all had to stay in the houses because we couldn't leave without going past the hole. The highways people came out, erected the fence up, and then they came out and put a second fence up around it as well."

It is thought the opening may be an unfortunate legacy of a historic local mine, a abandoned copper and tin mine.

McKenzie believed he would be separated from his car for a few days. But that short time have now turned into weeks.

A Possible Solution

An end may be in sight. The authorities has said it will work with McKenzie to – briefly – lift the barriers to allow the car to be recovered. He commented: "They have agreed to work with my insurance company's retrieval crew and try to arrange a date and an acceptable way of getting it out that ensures no anybody at risk."

The car has been significantly harmed and is likely to be declared a total loss. "On the bright side I can say my Mini met its end in a memorable way – not everyone can claim their car was eaten by the Earth itself," McKenzie remarked.

Council Statement

A representative from the authorities said it sympathised with McKenzie. But it added: "This collapse did not occur on public property. We have secured the location and advised the vehicle owner that we will arrange to lift the fence to enable him to retrieve the vehicle.

"Since no one owns the land, our barriers will remain in place until land ownership has been determined, and we will continue to monitor the surrounding area to ensure everyone's security."