Top 10 Great Cornish Walks

Top 10 Great Cornwall Coastal Walks

The South West Coast Path is fantastic everywhere making it so hard to choose a walk. So here are some suggestions that will make you stand and stare:

1 Kynance Cove
One of the prettiest beaches in the world is reached via a stunning section of the South West Coast Path, on the western side of the Lizard Peninsula. It’s just a ten minute walk from the National Trust car park to the cove, with steep steps towards the bottom. There’s a National Trust café at the cove, open March to October. Keen walkers can then choose to continue to Mullion Cove or to the Old Lifeboat House at the Lizard. The National Trust has Shetland ponies on the hills above Kynance, helping to maintain a habitat that encourages Cornwall’s national bird, the Cornish Chough. Note, no caravans or trailers permitted at the car park in Lizard town. Avoid car park at Lizard Lighthouse because the road has few passing places.
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2 Wheal Coates
There are endless footpaths of different lengths that will get you to Wheal Coates, though they all end up on the stretch of coast path between St Agnes and Porthtowan. Walk this coast path just once, and you’ll never forget its steep heathery slopes over the sea, topped by the stunningly located Towanroath Pumping Engine House (the site was mined for centuries but the surviving ruins date from the late Nineteenth Century). If you’re up for a long walk, it’s well worth navigating a route (walk 2 below), via St Agnes Beacon, site of a warning beacon during the Napoleonic Wars. Now it’s the centre of an important heathland habitat, and offers views over the Atlantic Coast.
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3 Godrevy Lighthouse
Start at the Godrevy Beach Café and head to your right, uphill, resisting the lure of the beach. The walk takes you up to Godrevy Head, high above Mutton Cove which can’t be reached from the path. There’s then the option to continue on the Coast Path to Navax Point. Even when the beach is busy, it’s usually quiet on these headlands, making it a brilliant place to go if you like exploring but have more reluctant family members. The lighthouse was built following the loss of the steamer, The Nile, with all hands in 1859, and it was manned by two lighthouse keepers until 1939.
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4 Tintagel Castle
There is a tenuous King Arthur link to Tintagel – probably imagined. The ruins you see today are mostly of a 13th century castle, but the headland is no less evocative for that – we count it as one of the wonders of the British landscape. Walk out from the old post office and join the footpath next to the Headland Camping and Caravan Park. Then follow the signs for Barras Nose and Tintagel Castle. The ruins are amazing, perched over the sea, and Barras Nose has brilliant views too.
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5 Rough Tor
A day spent in Bodmin Moor will show you an altogether wilder side of Cornwall, and a four mile walk can take in the two highest points in the County: Brown Willy and Rough Tor (pronounced ‘row-ter’). You get to Rough Tor first, so it’s a landscape perfectly accessible to children, but watch out for fogs, and bogs! Views are astonishing from Rough Tor and you’re walking in an ancient landscape, as dug by TVs Time Team.
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6 Lantic Bay
This south-facing sun-trap of a beach hides in a cove near Fowey. From a National Trust car park near Polruan, you follow a well-marked footpath, walk over the hill and this pretty cove surrounded by cliffs appears ahead of you. It’s a dog friendly beach, without nearby toilets or cafés, and it’s not particularly safe for swimming, thanks to some dangerous rip tides, so Lantic Bay is really about walking and enjoying some of the best views on the South West Coast Path. Keep going in a circuit around Polruan and you enter a different landscape – along the tidal estuary of Pont Pil.
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7 St Michael’s Mount
What could be more thrilling than walking on water? St Michael’s Mount’s causeway is only there at low tide, when you can walk across from the beach at Marazion, and if you miss the tide, a trip back by boat is just £2 one way. What you’ll find when you get there is a quite magical island, with tropical and exotic plants all the way up to the Medieval Castle, where there’s a café in the old laundry. The causeway takes just minutes, so why not end there after walking from Penzance Station main car park, SW476305 (TR18 2LR) for great views of St Michael’s Mount, and the village of Mousehole. Tel: 01736 710265 for accurate, day-to-day, causeway opening times.
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8 Levant Mine
A gentle, three mile walk from the South West Coast Path at Bosigran Cliffs takes you to the Levant Engine House, then on to Porthmeor Cove and the Porthmeor Tin Stamps. Levant was restored by the National Trust and is the only Cornish beam engine anywhere in the world that’s still in steam on its original site. The mine workings stretch out a mile under the sea. Levant was the site of a tragic accident in 1919 when a link snapped in its ‘man engine’, killing 31 men. It’s now an important part of Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site.
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9 Helford River
This quiet river landscape inspired Daphne Du Maurier when she wrote Frenchman’s Creek. Once you leave the main road and head into the private grounds of the Trelowarren Estate, you’re very near to places where the author visited her friend Clara, who lived at the house. Although it’s not open to the public, it has a brilliant Cornish Crafts Council gallery, and a very good restaurant, a spa, and parking for walks to through the woods to Tremayne Quay. If you want to stay a day or two, Gear Farm Caravan Club CL is just half a mile away.
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10 Porthoustock
We get used to thinking of beaches as pretty places, especially in Cornwall. On the East Coast of the Lizard Peninsula they have an altogether less tidy feel. Beaches are rocky and slatey, and strewn with metal chains used to pull in the fishing boats, and there are wrecks out in the bay, of many ships that have come to grief on The Manacles rocks. Start at Porthoustock, and, when the quarry signs show it’s safe, make your way past the blasting zone going south to Coverack. If the quarry is blasting, instead head for Porthallow via the private diving cove of Porthkerris where there is a shop and a café hut. Cornish Sea Salt is based at Porthkerris, though there’s really not much to see. The tiny fishing port of Porthallow has a pleasant pub.
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Want to know about more things to do and see in Cornwall?
To see the top 10 family beaches in Cornwall, click here.
For details on our top 20 Cornish attractions, click here.