Tour Pendennis Castle and its Tudor gun room

Look across Carrick Roads to St Mawes Castle

Visit the National Maritime Museum Cornwall on the quay

Walk Falmouth's main street and the Prince of Wales Pier

Henry VIII built Pendennis between 1540 and 1542, paired with St Mawes across Carrick Roads so the two forts' guns overlapped. Held for the King in the Civil War, it was taken by Parliament only after a long siege in 1646, and in the 1880s and 1890s an electrically operated minefield was laid across the Fal and worked from both castles. Below it Falmouth runs along the water on the Carrick Roads, with the National Maritime Museum Cornwall on the quay.

Falmouth: Pendennis Castle and the Carrick Roads

Falmouth and the Lizard

Plymouth

Down the south coast from Plymouth to Land's End and back up the north coast to Bude: Polperro and the Eden Project, Pendennis and the Lizard, the mines and the Minack in Penwith, then Fistral and Tintagel.

Cornwall: Plymouth to Land's End and the North Coast

Ten nights round Cornwall in a loop from Plymouth: the Eden Project's rainforest, Land's End and the Minack Theatre, the castle on Tintagel's headland, and a last night on Bodmin Moor.

Round Cornwall from Plymouth

Stand under the three spires of Truro Cathedral

Find the old St Mary's aisle built into the south side

Walk Lemon Street and the Georgian terraces of the town

See the Cornish collections at the Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery, formerly the Royal Cornwall Museum

The diocese of Truro was created in December 1876 and its cathedral built between 1880 and 1910 to a Gothic Revival design by John Loughborough Pearson — the first Anglican cathedral raised on a new site in England since Salisbury in 1220. It went up on the site of the parish church of St Mary, whose south aisle was kept and built into it. Below the three spires the Georgian streets run down to the river.

Truro: The First New Cathedral Since Salisbury

Eat a proper crimped Cornish pasty in the tin-mining country

Check it is the real thing: beef, potato, swede and onion with salt and pepper, in a D shape crimped along the side

Find the engine houses of the mining landscape around Redruth

Try it both ways: held by the crimp, as the story says, and end to end from the bag, 'the true Cornish way' according to the first Cornish recipe book

A real Cornish pasty is beef, potato, swede and onion with a light seasoning of salt and pepper, in a D-shaped pastry crimped along the side and made in Cornwall, and since 20 July 2011 the name has been protected in law — the result of a nine-year campaign by the Cornish Pasty Association, about fifty makers based in Cornwall. It became the working food of the tin miners of Cornwall and west Devon in the 17th and 18th centuries because the shape made a whole meal you could carry, and the story goes that the thick crimped edge was the handle a miner held and then threw away, so that fingers carrying traces of arsenic never touched the food.

The Cornish Pasty: Tin Country and a Protected Name

Walk out to the Towanroath engine house above the sea

Climb St Agnes Beacon for the view along the mining coast

Walk the coast path from Wheal Coates to Chapel Porth

Look for the flooded shafts and burrows of the old setts on the cliff

Wheal Coates stands on the cliff between Porthtowan and St Agnes, three engine houses of a tin mine worked from 1802, reopened in 1872 and closed in 1889 when the tin price fell; a last attempt in 1911–13 failed and it shut for good in 1914; the Towanroath pumping house sits halfway down the cliff above the sea. The mine is part of the Cornish Mining World Heritage landscape, and St Agnes Beacon rises behind it.

St Agnes and Wheal Coates: Engine Houses on the Cliff

Find Europe's only surviving pineapple pit, heated by rotting manure

Go down into the Jungle, the wild valley of subtropical tree ferns

Find the Mud Maid and the Giant's Head, made from rocks and plants

Walk down to the harbour at Mevagissey afterwards

The Tremayne family laid out these gardens near Mevagissey from the middle of the 18th century to the start of the 20th, in the Gardenesque style, with each area given a different character. Then the First World War took the gardeners and the whole thing was left to the brambles for seventy years, until a restoration in the 1990s brought it back and made it famous through television and books. They are now among the most visited gardens in Britain.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan: A Garden That Vanished for Seventy Years

Stand at Lizard Point, the most southerly point of mainland Britain

Walk down to Kynance Cove at low tide and round the stacks

See the serpentine rock being turned in a Lizard village workshop

Look at the dish aerials on Goonhilly Downs

Lizard Point is the most southerly point of mainland Britain, and the peninsula behind it is built of serpentine rock that the Victorians turned into ornaments. Kynance Cove, a mile and a half north, became famous in the early Victorian era — Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came, and so did Tennyson — and its islands and stacks are cut off by the tide. Inland on Goonhilly Downs stand the dishes of the satellite earth station.

The Lizard: Britain's Most Southerly Point and Kynance Cove

Take a surf lesson or hire a board on Fistral Beach

Watch a surf contest from the North Fistral complex when one is on

Walk out to the headland and look for the Cribbar breaking on a big swell

Watch the surfers from the beach at sunset with fish and chips

Fistral faces west into the Atlantic, which is why it is one of the most consistent surf breaks in Britain; the Newquay Surf Life Saving Club and the Newquay Boardriders are based here, and it hosts international competitions. Westerly and north-westerly groundswells make powerful waves for intermediate and advanced surfers, and when the swell is really big the Cribbar reef at the north end starts to break.