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Chy? I wasn’t familiar with the Ordnance Survey abbreviation for chimneys until I set off to walk around the ghost mines of Camborne. On every tump stand houses for engines built to raise ore from, and drop men into, the Great Flat Lode – a rock field that coughed up 90,000 tonnes of tin, worth $3 billion at today’s rates. Chimneys.

It all went up in smoke. The Phoenicians sailed to Cornwall to trade for tin. Possibly.



The Romans knew about it. It’s not known where the Tin Islands (or Cassiterides) in classical accounts were precisely located. Maybe Camborne or Galicia, or Brittany.

Somewhere in the Celtic fringe. In the western outposts, the connections are tenuous. There’s no bronze age without tin.

No pewter, no solder. A soft silvery metal with a bluish tinge, it makes up two parts per million of the earth’s crust, which makes it 500 times more common than gold. When a cold tin bar is bent the atoms cause a crackling sound.

This is the tin cry, which, pushed, can lead to a breaking. Warm it and it’s silent. Just beyond Camborne’s big Tesco – which occupies the former site of Holman No 1 Works, responsible for much mining engineering – was the great mine of Dolcoath.

The sett was originally worked for alluvial tin in the 1580s. By the 1720s, copper was the focus. Richard Trevithick, father of the inventor of the steam loco, was chief engineer in the mid-18th century.

Copper was worked out by the opening decades of the 19th century and closure threatened.

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