I'm sorry to say that during my last two visits, in 2007 and 2009, after many years away, I found Camborne largely unrecognisable and in some cases impossible to even work out where I was.
Macsalvors at Pool was a vast, gloomy cave of army surplus, engineering supplies and agricultural what-nots, with the crane hire being run from the yard out the back. The one at Hayle resembled nothing so much as a huge jumble sale, located in an old church.
I couldn't even identify Macsalvors in 2009.
I nearly didn't find the lecture that was my ostensible reason ( = excuse ) for being there, since the whole campus area was unfamiliar to me and the entry from the roadworks behind the Macdonalds quite unfindable.
One thing I'm glad I didn't see, by all accounts, was the steam engine at Robinsons'. I remember going to see it ( as a sherpa for John Watton, CSM's photographer-cum-AVtech extraordinaire ) and entering a murky world of shadows and cobwebs, with tarnished, patina'ed Victorian machinery filling the gloom and a stench of old steam oil, damp newspaper and incontinent cats. It would be too much to see it "stuffed and mounted" and painted red...
''the stopes soared beyond the range of our caplamps' - David Bick...... How times change .... oh, I don't know, I've still got a lamp like that.