The hills between Redruth and Truro are some of the most worked ground in Europe. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Gwennap was said to be the richest square mile of mining country in the world, with copper and tin coming out of shafts so close together that the engine houses seem to stand shoulder to shoulder. Today the chimneys and roofless buildings stand in gorse and bracken, and the red-brown streams and spoil heaps tell you what lay underneath. The area is part of the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site, and the village of St Day, with about seven hundred people, sits at its centre, with a fine ruined church in the middle of a green.
Gwennap Pit is the odd gem. It is a round hollow, a collapsed mine working that was later turned into a grass amphitheatre, and John Wesley preached here from 1762 for decades to crowds of thousands. The terraces cut in the sides date from the nineteenth century, and the place still holds Methodist gatherings. Nearby Poldice Valley and Wheal Maid show how the landscape was altered by waste and wheel pits; the soil is poisoned in places, and walkers are asked to keep to the paths.
Riding is delightful and slow. Cornish lanes here are narrow, banked with hedges and often deep, so you ride with your eyes on the next bend and an ear for a tractor coming the other way. The A393 and A3047 are better surfaced and carry the traffic, but the real fun is in the back roads between St Day, Chacewater and Scorrier. After rain the surface is greasy, and in summer the lanes can be clogged with holiday traffic. Sea mist sometimes rolls in off the north coast, and it can feel cold on a bright morning.
Redruth, four kilometres away, has about forty thousand people and plenty of fuel and food, and the neighbouring town of Camborne holds the Camborne School of Mines. Chacewater has a pub and a shop. A proper Cornish pasty, with crimped edge and a filling of beef, potato, swede and onion, was designed to be eaten by miners with dirty hands, and you should buy one fresh. Take it up to the pit, if the weather is dry, and listen to the wind in the gorse.