Walk the dressing floors and the dry at Geevor

Watch the Levant beam engine run under steam

Look out from the cliff over the sea that Levant's tunnels ran beneath

Geevor worked between 1911 and 1990 and produced about 50,000 tons of black tin; it is now a museum kept as a working mine, with the dressing floors, the changing house and a guided tour into the 18th-century Wheal Mexico workings. Next door at Levant the beam engine of 1840 still runs on steam, at the head of a mine whose tunnels ran up to 2.5 km out under the Atlantic. Both stand in the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site.

Geevor and Levant: The Mine Under the Sea

Penwith

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

Find Men-an-Tol on the moor and look through the circular opening in the stone at dusk

Walk out to Cape Cornwall, thought to be the westernmost point in Cornwall until the Ordnance Survey came

Photograph the Milky Way from the cliffs above Porthcurno

Be at Land's End before dawn and watch the stars set over the Atlantic

In December 2021 West Penwith, the far western end of Cornwall, was designated an International Dark Sky Park — the seventh in the UK and the second in Cornwall after Bodmin Moor — covering the coast from the edge of St Ives round by St Just, Sennen and Land's End to Mousehole, and inland to Sancreed and New Mill. Penwith holds a great concentration of prehistoric and early British remains: the Merry Maidens, Lanyon Quoit, Chûn Quoit, the Iron Age village at Chysauster, and Men-an-Tol, 'the stone of the hole', with its circular opening through the granite. Cape Cornwall, four miles north of Land's End, was believed to be the westernmost point in Cornwall until the first Ordnance Survey in the early 19th century.

West Penwith: A Dark Sky Park at the End of Cornwall

Hike the South West Coast Path from Botallack south towards Land's End

See the Crowns engine houses on the cliffs at Botallack, part of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site

Visit the Minack Theatre at Porthcurno, the open-air theatre Rowena Cade began building on the cliffs in 1931, and see a play if you come between Easter and October

Stand at Land's End, the westernmost point of mainland England

The far west of Cornwall is granite and old mines. At Botallack the Crowns engine houses stand on the cliffs, part of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site, and the South West Coast Path, 630 miles long, runs south from there to Land's End, the westernmost point of mainland England. Round the coast at Porthcurno, Rowena Cade began building the Minack Theatre into the cliff in 1931.

Penwith: Botallack, the Minack and Land's End

Swim in the geothermal pool heated from 410m down

Swim the big salt-water pool out on Battery Rocks

Look at the Art Deco lines said to come from a seagull in flight

Walk the Penzance promenade towards Newlyn afterwards

The Jubilee Pool was built out on Battery Rocks at Penzance to a design by Frank Latham, the borough engineer, between 1931 and 1934, its shape said to be taken from a seagull in flight. It opened on 31 May 1935 for George V's Silver Jubilee and had almost 60,000 visitors by that August. Its listing recognises it as the finest surviving example of its type after Saltdean Lido, and since 2020, when a pool heated by a geothermal well drilled 410m into the rock beneath it opened, it has been the only lido in the country heated from the ground.

The Jubilee Pool: Britain's Only Geothermal Lido

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

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

Cross the 2019 footbridge to the island half of the castle

Walk the mainland courtyards and the curtain wall

Go down to Merlin's Cave under the headland at low tide

Walk the coast path to Barras Nose for the view back

Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built a castle on the Tintagel headland in the 13th century, on a site that was probably a seasonal seat of the kings of Dumnonia. Geoffrey of Monmouth had written a century earlier that Arthur was conceived here, and the legend has clung to the place ever since. A footbridge opened in 2019 rejoins the two halves of the castle across the gap that the sea cut between them.