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.

Fistral Beach: Newquay's Atlantic Surf Break

Newquay

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

Newquay and St Agnes

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 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 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

Cycle the Camel Trail from Padstow to Wadebridge

Take the ferry across the estuary to Rock

Walk out along the estuary to Stepper Point

Padstow sits inside the Camel estuary behind the Doom Bar, a working harbour turned food town. The Camel Trail runs 18 miles from the quay along the old railway line to Wadebridge and on to Bodmin and Wenfordbridge, almost level and traffic-free apart from a short stretch through Wadebridge, and the ferry crosses the estuary to Rock.

Padstow and the Camel Trail

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

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

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

Surf or take a lesson on the beach break at Croyde

Ride a longboard on the long open face of Saunton Sands

Walk out round Baggy Point on the coast path

Walk into the dunes of Braunton Burrows, the core of the North Devon Biosphere

Croyde is the North Devon surf village, on the South West Coast Path under the National Trust headland at Baggy Point, and since 1999 it has held the GoldCoast Oceanfest surf and music festival on the weekend nearest the summer solstice — though the festival is taking 2026 off and is due back in June 2027. Round the corner at Saunton Sands the beach is long, flat and unusually exposed to the west, which makes it a favourite longboarding beach; until the RAF retired its Hercules in 2023, the beach was cordoned off a few times a year for them to practise landing on the sand.

Croyde and Saunton: North Devon's Surf Coast

Walk among the veteran pollarded hornbeams

Visit Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge, the grandstand built for Henry VIII's hunts in 1543

Find the Iron Age earthwork at Ambresbury Banks

Walk to Connaught Water and look for the fallow deer

Epping Forest runs twelve miles from the edge of London into Essex, saved when public outcry pushed the City of London Corporation to buy it — the first big win of the environmental movement in Europe — and the Corporation owns it still. It holds thousands of veteran pollarded hornbeams and oaks, the Iron Age earthworks of Loughton Camp and Ambresbury Banks, and the Tudor building now called Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge.