Where tourists seldom tread, part 10: four more towns with hidden histories

South Wheal Frances in Camborne, Cornwall, once a whole mining complex, is now as ‘evocative as a ruined cathedral’. Photograph: Ian Woolcock/Alamy

Camborne, Cornwall

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.