Cornwall (St Ives)

Top things to do in Cornwall (St Ives)

1. 01

   St Michael's Mount - the tidal causeway to the island castle

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   A castle-topped rock in Mount's Bay that you walk out to across a granite causeway at low tide and come back from by boat once the sea has closed behind you. The climb up the cobbled path leads to a medieval church and rooms still lived in by the family that has held the place for centuries, with terraced subtropical gardens clinging to the rock below. Check the tide before you set out, not after.

2. 02

   Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden - the studio left as she had it

   culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Hepworth's Trewyn studio in the middle of St Ives, with her tools still on the bench and her bronzes standing in the subtropical garden she planted around them. It is a small, quiet, extraordinary place, and it makes far more sense of the town's modernist story than any wall text can.

3. 03

   Tate St Ives - the modern art the town produced

   culture arts

   Built into the hillside above the surf beach on the site of the old gasworks, showing the painters and sculptors who made St Ives one of the few places in Britain where modernism actually took root. The upper windows frame the beach and the bay, which is the point: you look at a Nicholson, then at the thing he was looking at.

4. 04

   Minack Theatre - the amphitheatre cut into the cliff at Porthcurno

   culture arts scenic 👍 Popular

   Rowena Cade and two gardeners carved a Greek-style theatre out of the granite above a turquoise cove, and spent decades adding seats, steps and carved names by hand. Performances run through the warmer months with the Atlantic as the backdrop and gannets crossing the stage, and you can walk the terraces on a normal day too. Bring a cushion and something windproof, whatever the forecast says.

5. 05

   South West Coast Path - cliff walking between coves

   hiking scenic nature wildlife ⭐ Highly recommended

   The waymarked trail runs the whole Cornish coastline, and the stretches near the western tip are the ones people come back for: St Ives to Zennor over bracken and boulders, Porthcurno round to Land's End, the Lizard's serpentine headlands. Buses and branch lines let you walk one way and ride back, which is how to do the best sections without doubling anything.

6. 06

   Fistral, Watergate Bay and the north-coast surf beaches

   surfing adventure

   Atlantic swell hits the north coast head on, and the beach breaks between Sennen and Bude are where most of Britain learns to surf. Summer brings the smallest, friendliest waves and the warmest water for lessons and board hire; September through November is when the swell lines up properly and the crowds have gone. Wetsuits are worn year-round here, not because it is freezing but because it is never warm.

7. 07

   Kynance Cove and Lizard Point - the southernmost headland

   scenic nature wildlife

   Serpentine stacks and islands standing in white sand and impossibly green water, reached down a steep path from the clifftop, with caves and a tidal beach that vanishes at high water. Lizard Point a short walk on is the most southerly ground in mainland Britain, and the whole peninsula carries flowers found almost nowhere else in the country.

8. 08

   Geevor and Botallack - the tin mines on the Atlantic cliffs

   history scenic

   The engine houses at Botallack stand on a ledge above the surf with their shafts running out under the seabed, and at Geevor, which worked until 1990, you can go underground and talk to people who were miners here. This coast was once the most concentrated hard-rock mining district in the world, and the ruins along it are World Heritage listed rather than picturesque accidents.

9. 09

   Eden Project - the biomes in a worked-out clay pit

   nature wildlife culture arts 👍 Popular

   Two vast linked domes in a china clay crater near St Austell, one a humid rainforest with a canopy walkway and a waterfall, the other Mediterranean scrub and citrus. It is unashamedly a day out with children in mind, and it is also the most convincing thing to do in Cornwall when the rain sets in for a whole day.

10. 10

    Lost Gardens of Heligan - the estate that came back from the bramble

    nature wildlife history

    The gardeners went to the First World War and did not come back, and the Victorian pleasure grounds disappeared under bramble for seventy years until a restoration in the 1990s dug them out. The productive walled gardens are worked by hand as they were, and a jungle valley of tree ferns and rope bridges drops away below, along with the two turf-and-moss sculptures everyone photographs.

11. 11

    Cornish seafood and the pasty - eating on a working fishing coast

    food

    Newlyn is one of the busiest fishing ports in England, so crab, hake, mackerel, scallops and monkfish come off day boats a few miles from the plate, and Padstow built a national reputation on cooking them. The pasty is the other half of the story, a crimped miner's lunch of beef, potato, swede and onion, still baked to a protected recipe and best eaten from a bakery with your back to a wall out of the wind.

Getting to & around Cornwall (St Ives)

Know before you go