The Great Flat Lode Trail - Wheal Uny Mines

One of the most pleasant ways to visit the Wheal Uny mines is to park your vehicle near St Uny church and walk directly up to the mines from there. Park your vehicle carefully and walk down the road away from the junction passing graveyards first to your left and then the main walled graveyard to your right.

About 250 metres along the road a 'Public Bridleway' sign on your left indicates a path leading quite steeply uphill. Follow the track as it passes some fenced off mineshafts, carrying on climbing until you reach a Great Flat Lode waymarker post at the top. Take any of the paths provided to explore the engine houses and look out for their information plaques in black and gold ovals.

Retrace your steps to your vehicle or if you wish to explore the trail further return to the signed route and continue south towards Seleggan Smelting Works and the Basset Mines complex.

The Great Flat Lode is an enormous ore bearing body tilted at an angle of about 45 degrees 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. Follow the hyperlinks for more information and photographs on the main sections of this excellent trail.

'World Heritage' status for this area was granted in July 2006 and this should help to provide the necessary funding to improve and interlink all the mineral tramway projects. 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