Camborne in Cornwall

Camborne is a town in the Cornish countryside that was once described “…as the richest square mile in the whole of the world”.

That wealth was generated came from beneath the bucolic fields and common lands around the town where there was a rich mineral harvest of tin and copper. The first records of tin being found and exploited date back to 2000BC when it was found in the rocks exposed in riverbanks exposed by the natural forces of erosion.

By the mid nineteenth century, the tin and copper mining industry had reached its zenith employing two thirds of the population directly in mining. That was nearly three thousand people from a population of approximately four thousand five hundred. Other people in the town relied on the mines for their livelihoods such as the seventy five smiths recorded in the 1841 census as well as those working in industries fed by the raw materials being mined.

As well as once being described as the richest square mile in the world Camborne also held a world record. This was for the Dolcoath Mine which was worked to a depth of three and a half thousand feet. It was soon surpassed and was finally closed in 1921.

What had once been a small and isolated village, in less than one hundred years had been transformed into a boom town.

We tend to think of “globalisation” as a modern day phenomena of free trade across the something unique to our era. It is not new. The scale, speed and impact of it that we see in our time in which goods, services and capital can be moved across borders more freely than people is only a modern manifestation of what has been going on for millennia. This region of Cornwall provides the historical proof.

Camborne benefitted from the globalisation of the tin and copper markets since Phoenician times. Ingots were found in 2019 in a shipwreck off the coast of Israel whose chemical compounds identified them as being made from Cornish tin. The site of the wreck dates back to 1300 BCE. Camborne also became a victim of that same system when deposits of the valuable ores were found in places round the world where they were cheaper to extract and process.

Tin mining in Cornwall and Europe came to a seismic end after five thousand years in 1998 when the South Crofty mine was closed. The only memorials to this once great world dominating industry are solitary brick chimneys and derelict pithead buildings that punctuate the skyline of the countryside. Some of the pitheads have been renovated and are occupied by light industries or retail outlets. Sadly, none of these efforts at modernisation are as labour intensive as the industries they once housed. A more modern memorial to this industrial heritage is the Camborne School of Mining which draws in students from the UK and around the world. Camborne can no longer export raw materials. Instead, it has gone through an upgrade had an upgrade and now exports knowledge.

Tin extracted from the South Crofty mine has been bought by a local business since 1988 until the mine closed in 1998. It is used in the crafting of range of unique jewellery branded as the “South Crofty Collection”.

Some of that same tin took its place on the world stage at the London Olympics of 2012. There are now sixty five bronze medals around the world from those Olympics which will forever be a piece of Cornwall just like those precious ingots found off the coast of Israel.