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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walk the full circuit of the lake past the temples

Go into Flitcroft's Pantheon and his Temple of Apollo of 1765

Tour the Neo-Palladian house and its library

Cross the five-arched Palladian Bridge and find the grotto

Henry Hoare, son of a wealthy banker, bought this Wiltshire estate at the source of the River Stour in 1717, and what his family made here is one of the most famous gardens in the English landscape style anywhere — a lake with classical temples set round it so that the view composes itself as you walk. The 2,650-acre estate also holds a Grade I listed Neo-Palladian mansion and the village of Stourton, and it has been part-owned by the National Trust since 1946.

Stourhead: The English Landscape Garden Perfected

Drive the single road through the Trough of Bowland

Stop at the top of the pass between the two valleys

Go to Dunsop Bridge, near the geographic centre of Great Britain

Look for hen harriers, the emblem of the AONB, over the Bowland fells

The Forest of Bowland was made an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1964, and its upland core is very sparsely populated; the Bowland Fells are a Special Protection Area for breeding merlin and hen harrier. The Trough of Bowland is the pass through the middle of it, linking the valley of the Marshaw Wyre with Langden Brook and splitting the upland core in two. By one reckoning the geographic centre of Great Britain lies at the Whitendale Hanging Stones, about four miles north of Dunsop Bridge.