What's on in Cornwall

Cornwall sits right in the corner of Great Britain’s South West peninsula and is bordered by Devon to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Atlantic to the west. It covers over 3500 square kilometers, includes the Isles of Scilly and is blessed with some of the finest coastal scenery in all of Britain. Serving up the longest continuous stretch of beaches and coastline in the UK Cornwall is a county of coves and caves, north coast cliffs and small fishing ports, pilchard boats and schooners, tree lined creeks and granite breakwaters on the southern coast and a growing surfing scene. It is a county that manages to preserve the past whilst being innovative with the future, with futuristic biomes set in prehistoric landscapes and world famous galleries in medieval market towns.

Indeed Cornwall has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic era, through the Bronze Age and then was invaded by the Celts. In typically independent Cornish fashion there is no evidence that the Romans managed to make their way into Cornwall and by AD936 Cornwall had established a boundary between the English and Cornish people at Tamar. To this day many Cornish people believe Cornwall has a separate Celtic cultural identity to their English neighbours (with some still speaking Cornish) and question the constitutional legitimacy of declaring it a county rather than devolving it from England.

Perhaps this desire to rebel owes much to the wild and exposed landscape. From the High Cliffs of the north coast between St Gennys and Boscastle to the golden sandy beaches of Watergate Bay, Polzeath, Bude, Porthtowan, St. Agnes and St. Ives Cornwall is the very definition of windswept. Further inland the rugged Bodmin Moor offers wide-open panoramas and the big sky of exposed high granite cliffs. In contrast the south coast or ‘Cornish Riviera’ offers gentler, more sheltered beaches and ports such as Falmouth and St. Austell.

Most popular of all in Cornwall is the former fishing port of Newquay, whose stunning coastline and natural headland protection now offers rolling waves to the UK’s surfers and which has brought to Cornwall a booming nightlife and a thriving adrenaline sports scene. Also popular are the world famous biomes of the Eden Project, a modern wonder that transformed a disused clay mine into a global garden and rainforest.

With the Scilly Islands offering a taste of the continental, Cornwall truly is a beautiful, and independent, corner of the British Isles.

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