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The first indication the local man received of his situation was when a neighbor urgently banged on his door and informed him his cherished Mini had fallen into a hole.

"I stepped outside anticipating a small pothole under a wheel or something similar. But when I walked out to check it out, I understood, oh, that really is a significant cavity," he explained.

His vehicle had descended into a 3-metre wide gap, possibly caused by a collapsed mine shaft, and McKenzie has spent 25 days stuck in a administrative "nightmare" trying to determine how to retrieve his Mini.

The Main Issue: Unregistered Property

The complication is that the land has no registered owner. The local council has said it won't take down the barriers cordoning off the sinkhole until property rights had been established. "It's quite a difficult situation," said McKenzie, 36, a self-employed designer. "It's red tape everywhere."

McKenzie has lived in the area 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 would avoid receiving a ticket.

"I had finally reached a point like I was getting somewhere, I had a reliable small vehicle that was economical and simple to keep on the road. It meant I could finally focus on trying to save up to take my daughter on her aspirational journey to Japan one day. She's always wanted to go."

The Event and Consequences

Then came that loud rapping on a Saturday in November. "The person next door was very alarmed. The officers turned up and closed the area off. We all had to remain in the homes because we couldn't leave without passing by the hole. The highways people arrived, erected the barrier up, and then they came out and placed a second fence up around it as well."

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

McKenzie believed he would be separated from his vehicle for a short period. But days 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 Mini to be recovered. He said: "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 danger."

The car has been badly damaged and is likely to be written off. "At least I can say my Mini met its end in a memorable way – not everyone can claim their car was swallowed by the Earth itself," McKenzie noted.

Authority Response

A representative from the authorities said it sympathised with McKenzie. But it added: "The ground giving way did not happen on public property. We have made the area safe and informed the car owner that we will organize to temporarily remove the fence to allow him to retrieve the vehicle.

"Since no one owns the land, our safety measures will stay up until property ownership has been determined, and we will continue to monitor the surrounding area to ensure everyone's security."