Visiting Cornwall: A Practical Coast Guide
Visiting Cornwall in July means sharing the coast path with everyone else who had the same idea, and the car parks fill by half nine. The county takes about five and a half hours to cross by train from London, longer if you change at Plymouth and miss the connection, which happens often enough that nobody at the station looks surprised.
Most people arrive at Newquay or Truro and then discover that the branch lines are slow and the buses slower. A car helps. It also means paying £8 or £9 for a day's parking in St Ives and then circling the leisure centre for twenty minutes while somebody reverses badly out of a space. The park-and-ride at Lelant costs less and runs until early evening, though the last bus back is earlier than you'd like after a long lunch.
What surprises first-timers isn't the beaches, which are as good as the photographs suggest, but the scale of the place. Cornwall is 1,376 square miles and the roads between the north and south coasts are narrow, hedged, and frequently reduced to a single lane with a passing place. A journey that looks like forty minutes on the map takes an hour. You stop resenting it around day three.
Where visiting Cornwall actually works best
The north coast takes the swell. Fistral and Watergate Bay draw surfers and the associated vans selling coffee at £4 a cup, and the water is cold enough in June to make a wetsuit a sensible rather than a fashionable choice. The south coast is gentler, with sheltered coves, fewer crowds, and water that warms by a degree or two. Families tend to end up around Falmouth or the Roseland, and nobody seems to regret it.
St Ives is beautiful and everyone knows it. In August the streets around the harbour are so crowded that walking from the Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden to the Tate takes fifteen minutes for what is a four-minute walk in February. Go early, go late, or go in May. The Tate itself is small enough to see properly in ninety minutes and the ticket costs about £10.
There's a thing about Cornish place names that catches people out. Not a thing, a habit: the same village can be signed two different ways within a mile, and the signposts don't always agree with the satnav. Zennor, Mousehole, Mullion, Praa Sands. Mousehole is pronounced mow-zul, and the woman in the shop will correct you kindly and then do it again the second time.
Truro has a cathedral, a decent market on Saturdays, and a car park problem of its own. It's also the practical hub, with the main hospital, the big supermarkets, and the railway line running through. Most itineraries pass through at least once, whether or not they mean to.
Eating, sleeping, and what it costs
Food in Cornwall divides into two camps: the expensive seafood places with a view, and the bakeries selling pasties for £4.50 that will keep you going until dinner. Both are worth your time. The pasty is the better value, obviously, and the good ones are crimped on the side rather than the top, which people from Devon will argue about for hours.
Accommodation is where the budget goes. A decent self-catering cottage in a village within walking distance of a beach runs £900 to £1,400 a week in high season, and the same place in late September might be £500. Hotels are scarcer than the demand suggests and book out months ahead for July and August. There's a farm campsite near the north coast where a pitch costs £18 a night and the showers are hot but the queue at seven in the morning is eight deep.
Evening meals: a pub doing fish and chips will charge £14 to £18, and the fish is usually landed that morning. The restaurant with the harbour view charges £28 for the same fish with a better sauce and a worse view of the car park. Nobody has ever regretted the pub.
I should be honest about the weather. It's not the Mediterranean. The average July high is about 19°C, the sea sits around 16°C, and a week of low cloud and drizzle in the middle of summer is entirely normal. Pack a waterproof. Pack two. The days when it clears are spectacular, but they aren't guaranteed, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Walks, ferries, and the bits people skip
The South West Coast Path runs for 296 miles along the Cornish section alone. You don't have to walk all of it. The stretch from Porthcurno to Land's End takes about three hours at an unhurried pace and includes the Minack Theatre, which is a real amphitheatre carved into the cliff and worth the £6 to look around even if you don't catch a show.
Ferries are the underrated bit. The St Mawes ferry from Falmouth takes twenty minutes and costs £8 return, and it drops you in a village that feels a hundred miles from anywhere. The foot ferry to Padstow from Rock is shorter and busier. Both beat driving around the estuary, which takes forty minutes and involves a queue.
Land's End itself is a letdown, if I'm being straight. The actual point is behind a commercial complex selling experiences and photographs, and the walk to the signpost is shorter than you think. Better to see it from the coast path above and skip the car park. The Lizard, further south, is quieter and arguably more striking, with serpentine rock and a lighthouse and a cafe that does a decent crab sandwich.
The Eden Project near St Austell is the other big draw, and it's genuinely impressive, two biomes under a former clay pit with a rainforest inside one of them. Tickets run about £35 for adults, which stings, and the place is heaving in August. Book ahead. The same goes for the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which are more interesting and less crowded and take a full afternoon.
There's a small beach near Coverack where the car park is a field, the field floods after rain, and the farmer charges £5 whatever the weather. A friend of mine got his hire car stuck there for two hours. It has nothing to do with anything else in this article. I mention it because he still talks about it.
Getting around without losing your temper
Trains run from Paddington to Truro in about four and a half hours, and the branch line from Truro to Falmouth is one of the prettiest short journeys in England. Buses cover the main towns but not the coves, and the timetables thin out sharply after six. If you're relying on public transport, base yourself in one place and walk.
Cycling is possible on the Camel Trail, which is flat and runs from Padstow to Wadebridge and on to Bodmin, and the hire costs about £15 for a half day. The rest of the county is hilly in a way that looks charming from the car and punishing on a bike.
Driving in summer requires patience. The A30 is fine until it isn't, and the last twenty miles into Newquay on a Friday in August can take an hour. Single-track lanes have passing places, and the etiquette is to reverse to the nearest one rather than argue. Most people do. A few don't.
Mobile signal is patchy in the valleys and non-existent on parts of the coast path. Download the maps before you go. The same applies to the tide tables, which matter more than the maps: several beaches are cut off at high water, and the lifeguards put up signs that people ignore every single summer.
If there's one piece of advice worth taking, it's to plan less. The county rewards a slow day in one place over a rushed tour of five. Pick a stretch of coast, walk it, eat a pasty, sit on a wall. Visiting Cornwall works best when it isn't treated as a checklist. You get more out of it by lingering than by covering ground.
The bakery on the harbour road in St Ives sells out of saffron buns by eleven, and the woman behind the counter keeps a paper list of regulars taped to the till.
Further reading: Cornwall on Wikipedia.
