Engine houses stand like chess pieces on the southern flank of Bodmin Moor, tall granite boxes with their chimneys still pointing at the sky, and around them the ground is scarred by spoil heaps, shafts and old tramway beds. This is the Caradon Mining District, around the village of Pensilva and the hill of Caradon, where copper was found in the 1830s and set off a boom that made it, for a few decades, one of the richest copper districts in Britain. It is one of the ten areas of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site, listed in 2006.
The boom brought thousands of people, new villages like Minions and Pensilva, chapels and a railway, the Liskeard and Caradon line, which carried ore down to the canal and the port of Looe. When copper prices collapsed later in the century, the miners left, many for the mines of America, Australia and South Africa, taking Cornish engineering and the pasty with them. The moor took back what was left.
Up on the high ground around Minions the views are enormous, across Bodmin Moor to the north and down to the Tamar valley and Plymouth Sound on clear days. Bronze Age monuments sit among the mine ruins: the Hurlers, three stone circles, and the Cheesewring, a stack of granite slabs balanced on a tor above an old quarry. Ponies and sheep graze freely, and skylarks sing over the heather in spring.
The roads up here are narrow, unfenced in places and sometimes shared with livestock, with cattle grids, blind crests and very little room to pass. They are fun at a gentle pace, with long views and open moorland, but the weather can close in quickly with fog and rain sweeping across from the Atlantic. The lanes down to Liskeard and Callington are the classic Cornish type, sunk between high hedges, so take blind bends with care and expect tractors.
Pensilva is a village with a shop, and Minions has a tea room and a pub. For fuel, go to Liskeard, six kilometres away and a market town of over nine thousand people, or to Callington. A Cornish pasty from a proper baker in Liskeard is the obvious lunch.