Walk down into Polperro past the Shell House to the harbour

Visit the Polperro Heritage Museum of Smuggling and Fishing

Polperro is a fishing village packed into a cleft with a harbour that can be shut against the sea by a gate, and smuggling reached its height here in the late 18th century, financed by a local merchant, Zephaniah Job, known as the Smugglers' Banker. The Heritage Museum on the quay tells that story, and Looe, four miles east, is a working fishing port either side of a seven-arched bridge.

Polperro and Looe: The Smuggling Harbours

Looe to Mevagissey

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

Looe, Eden and Heligan

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

Walk through the Rainforest Biome at the Eden Project, one of the largest indoor rainforests in the world, in the former china clay pit at Bodelva

Cross the canopy walkway high above the rainforest floor

Walk the Mediterranean Biome with its olives, vines and citrus

Visit The Core, the education centre whose spiral cladding echoes the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower

The Eden Project was built in a worked-out china clay pit at Bodelva, and its Rainforest Biome is one of the largest indoor rainforests in the world, with a canopy walkway high above the floor. The Mediterranean Biome grows olives, vines and citrus, and The Core, the education centre, is clad in a spiral that echoes the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower.

The Eden Project: The Rainforest in a Clay Pit

Photograph the night sky above the Hurlers, three Bronze Age stone circles by Minions

Climb Stowe's Hill to the Cheesewring, the stack of weathered granite slabs

Look into the Cheesewring Quarry, which supplied the granite for Tower Bridge

Climb Brown Willy (420m), the highest point on Bodmin Moor

Bodmin Moor's east side, around the old mining village of Minions, holds the Hurlers, three Bronze Age stone circles, and on Stowe's Hill above them the Cheesewring, a natural stack of weathered granite slabs beside the quarry that supplied the granite for Tower Bridge. The moor has dark-sky status, and Brown Willy, the highest point in Cornwall, rises to the north-west.

Bodmin Moor Dark Sky Landscape

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

Visit Jamaica Inn at Bolventor on Bodmin Moor, the 18th-century coaching inn that inspired Daphne du Maurier's novel of 1936, and its smugglers' museum

Walk up Brown Willy, at 420 metres the highest point in Cornwall, or its neighbour Rough Tor

Jamaica Inn stands alone on the Bodmin Moor road at Bolventor, an 18th-century coaching inn on the route the contraband travelled inland from the coast, and Daphne du Maurier used it for the novel after being lost on the moor in fog. The moor around it holds Dozmary Pool, where one story says Excalibur went back into the water.

Jamaica Inn and Bodmin Moor: The Smugglers' Road

See the Black Friars Distillery building of 1431 on Southside Street

Try the 57% navy strength, the traditional strength the Royal Navy demanded

Find the Black Friars name embossed on the bottles, from the friary the building is said to have been

Walk the cobbled streets of the Barbican around it and find the Elizabethan House

Plymouth Gin has been distilled on one site on the Barbican since 1793, in a building put up in 1431 that is said to have been a Dominican friary — which is why it has always been the Black Friars Distillery, a name embossed on the bottles. The Navy took its gin from here, and the distillery still makes a navy strength at 57% ABV, the traditional proof the Royal Navy demanded.

Black Friars: Gin Distilled on the Same Spot Since 1793

See Smeaton's Tower, the upper part of the third Eddystone lighthouse, on the Hoe

Stand at the Mayflower Steps on the Barbican, near where the Pilgrims left in 1620

Walk the Hoe promenade below the walls of the Royal Citadel

Take the boat trip round the naval dockyard from the Barbican

Smeaton's Tower, the upper part of the third Eddystone lighthouse, stood on its rock from 1759 until 1882, when it was taken down and rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe as a memorial to its engineer, John Smeaton — a major step forward in lighthouse design. Below the Hoe, the Barbican keeps its Elizabethan streets, and the Mayflower Steps commemorate the Pilgrims' departure nearby in 1620.

Plymouth: The Hoe, Smeaton's Tower and the Mayflower Steps

Tour the house that stood in for Wayne Manor

Walk the formal gardens Lutyens simplified and Gertrude Jekyll's herb garden

Stand on the concert lawn where Oasis played to 250,000 over two nights

Walk the dinosaur trail through the park woods

Knebworth has belonged to the Lytton family since 1490, and the Victorian rebuilding covered the Tudor house in turrets, domes and gargoyles — which is why it was used as Wayne Manor in Batman in 1989. Since 1974 the lawns have held some of the biggest concerts in Britain, from Led Zeppelin to Oasis.

Knebworth: Wayne Manor and the Concert Lawn

Walk to the Armed Forces Memorial and read the walls

Find the Shot at Dawn memorial in the trees

Walk the riverside paths between the memorials

The Royal British Legion National Remembrance Gardens at Alrewas, known until September 2026 as the National Memorial Arboretum, were planted on old gravel workings between the Tame and the Trent and now hold hundreds of memorials among tens of thousands of trees. At the centre the Armed Forces Memorial carries the names of everyone killed on duty since the end of the Second World War, and at 11am on 11 November, if the sun is out, a shaft of light passes through slits in its walls onto the wreath at the centre.