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The first indication the local man had of his situation was when a person living nearby urgently banged on his door and told him his beloved Mini had plunged into a hole.

"I stepped outside anticipating a minor dip under a tire or something similar. But when I walked out to check it out, I realized, oh, that truly is a proper hole," he explained.

His vehicle had descended into a 3-metre wide gap, likely created by a mineshaft collapse, and McKenzie has spent 25 days stuck in a bureaucratic "nightmare" trying to figure out how to extricate his car.

The Core Problem: Unregistered Land

The complication is that the property isn't registered. The authorities has stated it can't remove the barriers cordoning off the hole until land ownership had been confirmed. "It's quite a difficult situation," said McKenzie, 36, a self-employed creative. "It's red tape everywhere."

McKenzie has lived in the area in Redruth for about a decade and in fact has a parking space beside his house, but it is too narrow to be useful so he started leaving his car outside a local bakery. He had checked with both the bakery and the local authority that he wouldn't get a parking fine.

"I'd finally felt like I was getting somewhere, I had a dependable small vehicle that was fuel-efficient and simple to keep on the road. It signified I could at last focus on trying to put money aside to take my child on her aspirational journey to Japan someday. She's constantly dreamed to go."

The Event and Consequences

Then came that knock on the door on a Saturday in November. "The person next door was very alarmed. The police turned up and closed the area off. We all had to stay in the houses because we can't get out without going past the collapse. The highways people arrived, put the barrier up, and then they came out and placed a additional barrier up surrounding it as well."

It is thought the opening may be an unfortunate legacy of a historic local mine, a abandoned mining site.

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

A Possible Resolution

An conclusion may be approaching. The council has said it will cooperate with McKenzie to – temporarily – lift the fences to allow the car to be recovered. He commented: "They are willing to work with my insurer's recovery team and try to schedule a date and an acceptable way of extracting it that doesn't put anybody at risk."

The vehicle has been significantly harmed and is probably to be written off. "At least I can say my Mini met its end in style – not everyone can claim their vehicle was eaten by the ground beneath them," McKenzie noted.

Council Statement

A spokesperson from the authorities said it sympathised with McKenzie. But it said: "This collapse did not happen on council land. We have secured the location and advised the car owner that we will organize to lift the fence to allow him to retrieve the vehicle.

"As the land is unregistered, our safety measures will remain in place until land ownership has been established, and we will persist to observe the vicinity to ensure public safety."