The Great Flat Lode Trail

The Great Flat Lode is an enormous ore bearing body tilted at an angle of about 10 degrees to the horizontal situated to the south of Carn Brea. Normally lodes are found perpendicular to the ground surface or at best at angles of about 60 degrees. The Great Flat lode got its name as in relative terms it lay a lot flatter in the ground. This, meant that mines could be placed at the optimum locations to extract the tin or copper ore from the ground without digging to excessive depths. The Great Flat Lode Trail encompasses all the major mines of the Camborne-Redruth area running in a 7.5 mile multi-use circular trail around the granite hill of Carn Brea.

The mines of the Great Flat Lode helped to provide employment to Men (miners), women and children (Ore dressers) at a time when the rest of the Cornish Mining industry was in decline. As the copper ores became exhausted in about 1870, the mine owners explored deeper finding fine high quality tin concentrations underlying the copper. This gave the mines of the Great Flat Lode a new lease of life. After some of the companies amalgamated in the late 1890's the mines continued producing until about 1918. Click HERE for a cross-sectional diagram of the Great Flat Lode from the excellent Camborne School of Mines Virtual Museum. Follow the hyperlinks for more information and photographs on the main sections of this excellent trail.

Since the area has now achieved 'World Heritage' status, Cornwall in Focus will monitor improvements and events - such as the Mineral Tramways Festival in August and report back. The majority of the trail is off-road and suitable for walkers, horse riders and cyclists. There are even some parts accessible to wheelchair users.

For those of you with possibly a little more time to explore, once you've done 'the tourist bit', why not explore Cornwall's industrial heritage through its Tin and Copper Mines or learn more from my Cornish Bookstore

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.