Ridgeway

Ridgeway, located in Stoke's grim north, was once the site of Stoke's largest fool's gold-prospecting location, its population slowly decreased over the course of the 20th Century until the last residents left in the 1980s.

A group of hunters, lead by the intrepid Lyndon Jeffries, discovered traces of the valuable metal in 1888 in the mountainous area. Fool's Gold was at the time more valuable then real gold, but not as valuable as rolled gold. Jeffries and his crew immediately built a mine to pump for the metal.

Ridgeway, yeaterday

After the government introduced the Fool's Act of 1898, lowering the value of fool's gold, the bottoms fell out of the local economy and the town became all but deserted as its fledgling population fled north to look for work. The town was finally emptied in 1914, when the last residents fled into hiding in the mountains to become war deserters. Most of the metal buildings were broken up and used as materials to kill Germans with.

Today, the town has been restored to something like its pre-WW2 glory for the sake of tourism, though many of the buildings today are merely paintings of the buildings on big bits of wood. Fool's gold-mining and shoot-outs are re-enacted for the benefit of tourists and schoolchildren forced there on school trips.

It is mainly used nowadays by paintballing companies.