Cornwall

Few ruins have a more dramatic setting. Tintagel's castle stands partly on the mainland and partly on a rocky headland, almost an island, joined to it by a narrow neck of land that has mostly crumbled away. Long before the medieval castle, between roughly the fifth and seventh centuries, this was a stronghold of Cornish rulers trading across the Mediterranean, and in the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth made it the place where King Arthur was conceived, a story that has clung to it ever since. In the thirteenth century Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built the castle whose walls survive, probably chosen for its legendary associations as much as its defences.

Since 2019 a slender footbridge, its two halves almost touching in the middle, has carried visitors across the chasm to the island, where you can explore the remains of early buildings and see Gallos, a bronze figure inspired by the Arthurian legend, looking out to sea. At low tide you can also go down to the beach and look into Merlin's Cave.

TipEnglish Heritage runs the site and recommends booking a timed ticket in advance, which is also cheaper. Hours are shorter in winter, and the bridge can close in high winds. Expect steep steps.

A tightly packed fishing village of whitewashed and slate-hung cottages crammed into a steep cove, with lanes so narrow that one is nicknamed Squeezy Belly Alley. Small boats still land crab and lobster on the harbour beach. Television has made it famous as the fictional Portwenn in the long-running series Doc Martin, and the sea-shanty group Fisherman's Friends began here, sometimes singing on the harbour in summer.

TipPark in the large car park at the top of the village and walk down; driving into the centre is a mistake. The coast path east to Port Gaverne and beyond is a lovely short walk.

Padstow's harbour, ringed by old stone houses on the Camel estuary, has become one of the culinary centres of the West Country, thanks largely to the chef Rick Stein, whose seafood restaurant opened here in 1975 and has since grown into a small empire of cafés, shops and fish and chips. Behind the quayside lie narrow streets and the church of St Petroc. On May Day the town holds the 'Obby 'Oss festival, an old celebration of summer with drums, accordions and a black-cloaked hobby horse dancing through the streets.

A small foot ferry crosses the estuary to Rock and its sandy beaches, and the Camel Trail, a level cycling and walking path on an old railway, follows the river inland to Wadebridge and Bodmin, with bikes for hire beside the harbour.

TipBook well ahead for dinner at the best-known restaurants in summer, or eat fish and chips on the harbour wall and watch out for the gulls.

Along a stretch of coast between Padstow and Newquay, a line of huge rock stacks stands on a long sandy beach below high cliffs, said in local legend to be the stepping stones of a giant called Bedruthan. The clifftop at Carnewas, cared for by the National Trust, gives one of the classic views of the north coast, and it's especially fine at sunset.

TipThe beach is cut off at high tide and the cliff staircase down to it has been closed for long periods after rockfalls; check with the National Trust before planning to go down, and never get caught by the tide below the cliffs.

Newquay is Cornwall's biggest resort and the capital of British surfing, and Fistral, on the west side of the headland, is its most famous beach: a broad sweep of sand between two headlands that catches consistent Atlantic swell and hosts surf competitions. Surf schools along the beach run lessons for complete beginners, with wetsuits and boards to hire. The town itself is lively, sometimes boisterous, with beaches on every side, and in August the Boardmasters festival brings music and surfing to Fistral and Watergate Bay.

TipSwim and surf only between the red and yellow flags when lifeguards are on duty, and learn to recognise rip currents; the Atlantic beaches can be dangerous even on calm-looking days.

St Ives has been an artists' town since the late nineteenth century, when painters came for the clear light, and it became a centre of British modernism in the decades after Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo settled here in 1939. Tate St Ives, a white, curving building above Porthmeor Beach on the site of an old gasworks, shows work by the St Ives artists alongside modern and contemporary exhibitions; a large extension opened in 2017. Through its windows, the surfers on Porthmeor look like part of the display.

The town spreads over a small peninsula, with the harbour and its beach on one side, Porthmeor's surf on the other, and Porthminster's calm sands to the south, all linked by steep lanes of granite cottages, galleries and pasty shops. The Island, a grassy headland with a tiny chapel, is the place for sunset.

TipTate St Ives needs a ticket. The gallery is changing its collection displays from November 2026 into early 2027, with some rooms closed at different times, so check before travelling for a particular work. Come by train on the branch line from St Erth, which runs along the coast; summer parking in St Ives is very limited.

Barbara Hepworth lived and worked at Trewyn Studio, in the middle of St Ives, from 1949 until her death in a fire there in 1975. Her studio, workshops and walled garden are kept much as she left them, with bronze and stone sculptures set among palms, magnolias and bamboo. It's a small, peaceful place and one of the best introductions anywhere to her work. Tate runs it, and it needs a separate ticket from the main gallery.

The coast between St Just and Pendeen is the most spectacular part of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape, a World Heritage Site since 2006. At Botallack, the two Crowns engine houses cling to the rocks at the foot of the cliffs, where miners once followed copper and tin lodes out under the sea bed. A short walk north, the National Trust keeps a working steam beam engine at Levant, and next door Geevor Tin Mine, which closed in 1990, is now a museum where you can go underground into an eighteenth-century working, see the processing mill and hear the stories of the miners.

TipHours at Geevor and Levant vary by season, and the underground tour is not suitable for everyone; check before you go. Keep to the paths, as old shafts riddle this coast.

Where two seas are said to meet, this rounded headland was long thought to be the most westerly point in Britain, before Land's End took the title. It is far quieter than its famous neighbour, with a short climb past the old mine stack to the summit and views of the Brisons rocks offshore, the Longships lighthouse and, on clear days, the Isles of Scilly.

The westernmost point of mainland England is a place of high granite cliffs, sea-carved arches and the Longships lighthouse a mile out to sea, with the Isles of Scilly visible on clear days. It's also the traditional start or finish of the 874-mile journey to John o'Groats in Scotland. A commercial visitor complex with shops, cafés and attractions sits on the headland, which divides opinion, but the cliffs themselves are free to walk.

TipParking is charged. For a better experience, walk in along the coast path from Sennen Cove, about a mile to the north, with its fine surf beach.

A small cove of pale shell sand and startlingly clear turquoise water between granite cliffs, one of the loveliest beaches in Britain. Porthcurno was also, improbably, a hub of global communications: from 1870 undersea telegraph cables came ashore here, linking Britain with its empire, and in the Second World War the station was protected in tunnels cut into the hillside. The PK Porthcurno museum tells the story in the old buildings and tunnels.

TipThe beach gets very busy on summer afternoons and shrinks at high tide, with strong currents at times. Pedn Vounder, along the coast, is beautiful but reached only by a scramble and cut off by the tide.

An open-air theatre carved into the cliffs above Porthcurno, with tiered seats of stone and concrete facing a stage with only the sea and sky behind it. It was the life's work of Rowena Cade, who began building it with her gardener in the early 1930s, staging The Tempest in 1932, and kept working on it, moving rock and hand-carving lettering into the seats, well into old age. Today it stages a summer season of plays, musicals and concerts, and is open by day for visits, with a sub-tropical garden of succulents spilling down the cliff.

TipTickets for both performances and daytime visits are sold online, and popular dates sell out; book ahead and bring cushions, layers and waterproofs, as shows go ahead in most weather.

Pronounced "Mowzel", this granite fishing village south of Penzance curls around a small harbour sheltered by stone breakwaters. Its lanes of cottages and tiny galleries are among the prettiest in Cornwall. The village has a long memory: Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777, is traditionally named as one of the last native speakers of Cornish, and every year on 23 December, Tom Bawcock's Eve, locals eat stargazy pie, with fish heads poking through the crust, to remember a fisherman who saved the village from famine. From December into January the harbour is strung with Christmas lights.

TipParking is very tight; the coastal bus from Penzance is the easier way to arrive, or walk the coast path from Newlyn.

A rocky tidal island in Mount's Bay crowned by a medieval church and castle, with a small harbour and village at its foot. It was a Benedictine priory, linked to Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, and later a fortress; since the seventeenth century it has been home to the St Aubyn family, who still live there, while the National Trust cares for much of the island. Inside, you pass from the medieval church to grand rooms and the castle terraces, with sweeping views back to Marazion and Penzance. The terraced garden on the island's cliffs is planted with succulents and exotic plants that thrive in the warmth of the rocks.

At low tide you walk over from Marazion on a cobbled causeway; when the tide covers it, small boats ferry visitors across, from mid-March to the end of October.

TipCheck the tide times and the opening days before you go, as the castle and gardens don't open every day and the garden closes for the winter. Booking in advance is cheaper.

On the west side of the Lizard peninsula, Kynance is one of the most photographed places in Cornwall: white sand, islands and stacks of dark green and red serpentine rock, and water of an almost tropical blue. It's cared for by the National Trust, with a clifftop car park and a steep path down to the beach and a small café. At low tide you can walk between the islands and explore caves; at high tide most of the beach disappears.

TipArrive early in summer, as the car park fills, and check tide times before going down. The coast path from here to Lizard Point takes about an hour.

The most southerly point of mainland Britain, a headland of rugged cliffs above a tiny old lifeboat station, with the white Lizard Lighthouse just inland. The geology here is unusual, much of it the remains of ancient ocean floor, and the serpentine stone is carved into ornaments in local workshops. Look out for choughs, the red-billed crows that appear on Cornwall's coat of arms: after dying out in the county, they returned on their own in 2001 and now breed along this coast. Seals and, in summer, basking sharks can sometimes be seen offshore.

TipThe village of Lizard, a short walk inland, has pasty shops and cafés. Combine the point with Kynance on a coast-path walk.

Falmouth sits on one of the world's largest natural harbours, the deep estuary of the Fal, and has long lived from the sea: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was the base of the Packet Service, carrying mail across the Atlantic and the empire. Today it's a lively university town with a long main street of independent shops, harbourside pubs and three beaches facing the bay. The National Maritime Museum Cornwall, on the waterfront, has a collection of small boats and a tower looking out over the harbour and underwater windows into it.

Ferries cross the harbour to St Mawes and Flushing and run up the river to Truro, Cornwall's small cathedral city, through some of the most beautiful wooded creeks in the county.

TipThe ferry to St Mawes, with its own Henrician castle and pretty waterfront, makes a fine half-day trip.

On the headland at the mouth of the Fal, Henry VIII built a round artillery fort in the 1540s, facing a twin across the water at St Mawes, to protect the harbour from French and Spanish attack. It was later ringed with larger defences, held out for the king through a long siege in the Civil War, and was armed again in both world wars. English Heritage runs it today, with displays from the Tudor keep to the twentieth-century gun batteries, and noon gun firings on many days in summer.

The gardens of the Tremayne family's Heligan estate, near Mevagissey, flourished in Victorian times, then fell into decay after many of the gardeners went to fight in the First World War and did not return. In 1990 they were rediscovered under brambles and restored, becoming one of the best-loved gardens in Britain. There are walled kitchen gardens growing old varieties of fruit and vegetables, a pineapple pit heated by rotting manure as the Victorians did it, Italian and flower gardens, and the Jungle, a steep valley of tree ferns, palms and giant rhubarb with a rope bridge. In the woods, a sleeping giant's head of earth and plants, the Mud Maid, lies among the trees.

TipAllow at least half a day. The fishing harbour at Mevagissey is a couple of miles away.

In a former china clay pit near St Austell, a cluster of giant geodesic domes holds the world's plants. Eden opened in 2001, and its Rainforest Biome, the largest indoor rainforest in the world, recreates the heat and humidity of the tropics, with a canopy walkway and waterfall; the Mediterranean Biome holds olive groves, vines and citrus. Outdoors, terraced gardens cover the old pit sides with crops and plants from temperate climates. There's an emphasis throughout on how people depend on plants, and in winter Eden puts on seasonal events, including Christmas lights and ice skating.

TipThe biome walkways get busy and hot in the middle of the day; book online and arrive at opening. China clay country around St Austell, with its white spoil heaps, is a curious landscape in its own right.

A handsome old port of steep streets and pastel houses on the deep Fowey estuary, still busy with yachts, ferries and the occasional ship loading china clay upriver. The novelist Daphne du Maurier lived here and nearby, and the town holds a festival in her name each spring. A small foot ferry crosses to the village of Polruan, and the Hall Walk, a circular route of a few miles via the Bodinnick car ferry, takes in woodland paths and some of the best views in Cornwall.

TipPark in the main car park above the town and walk down, as the centre is very narrow. Readymoney Cove, a short walk south, is a sheltered beach with a ruined blockhouse.