west cornwall

The far south-western corner of England is a granite knob of primeval-looking treeless hills that feels almost a separate country in itself. Known as Penwith, this is the wild west: blustery moors and stone-walled pastures, haunting ruins of abandoned tin mines, astonishingly rich archaeological remains dating back thousands of years (you'll need an Ordnance Survey map to locate most of them) and above all one of the most rugged and varied stretches of coastline in the country.

This tour doesn't cover great distances, but there is more on the way than you could see in a day. The northern coast road from St Ives to St Just is one of the few drives in Cornwall to give really good views; elsewhere it really repays the effort to stop off and stroll virtually any section of the continuous coast path, which gets much closer up to the cliffs than the road.

There are some marvellous sandy beaches on the way, with the best ones for swimming at St Ives and Sennen Cove. But one to stay clear of is the idyllic-looking beach at Portheras Cove, which unfortunately is unsafe as there is jagged metal around (the debris from a shipwreck that was rather thoughtlessly blown up in the 1960s).