The Cottles is in an ideal location for exploring the many attractions and activities that Cornwall has to offer.

East Looe & Plaidy

Popular wide sandy beaches with all facilities nearby. Easy access with plenty of car parking. Excellent restaurants and pubs are plentiful, as well as an abundance of shops.

Purely Cornish, a wonderful delicatessen, specialising in the best of local produce, is well worth a visit, and can be found in Buller Street, East Looe. www.purelycornish.co.uk

Activities range from crab fishing, sea fishing, surfing, sailing, deep sea diving, shark fishing, or just relaxing by hiring your own motor boat.

For information on activities within the local area, visit www.activecornwall.co.uk

Hannafore / West Looe

Extensive shingle and rock beach, with good rock pools, and view of Looe Island. Tennis courts, mini golf, and bowling green open to visitors.

Free parking on beach road. Cafes, toilets and pubs
all near by.

Polruan

1 mile south of Fowey off the A3082.

Facing St Catherine’s Castle across the mouth of the River Fowey, Polruan is a pretty village of cottages climbing high above the waterfront.

There is a passenger ferry that runs between Polruan and Fowey. Beside the harbour, which is still busy with pleasure craft and china clay vessels, lies the late 15th Century Polruan Blockhouse. This is one of a pair of artillery buildings that was constructed to control the entrance to Fowey. It was here that during the Hundred Years War, heavy linked chains were stretched between the two to prevent a sea invasion by the French. The grooves made by the chains can still be seen carved into the rock.

Fowey

A lovely old port and historic seafaring town, Fowey
( pronounced Foy ) guards the entrance to the river from which it takes its name. An attractive place, with steep, narrow streets and alleyways that lead down to one of the best natural harbours along the south coast. Fowey exhibits a pleasant mixture of architectural styles that range from Elizabethan to Edwardian. For the past 700 years, Fowey has been connected to Bodinnick by car ferry which has, for many years, been known locally as The Passage.

Bodinnick is a pretty hamlet that runs up hill away from the ferry slipway which provides car and passenger services across the river to Fowey. Close to the slipway stands the house in which Daphne du Maurier lived before her marriage, and where she wrote her first novel, The Loving Spirit.

Eden Project

Since it’s opening in May 2001, the Eden Project has been a huge international success, bringing many thousands of visitors and much needed revenue to Cornwall.

An abandoned china clay pitt just outside St Austell has become home to the largest conservatories (“biomes”) in the world where, in the space of a day, visitors can walk from steamy rain forests to the warmth of the Mediterranean in a project that aims to “promote the understanding and responsible management of the vital relationship between plants, people and resources”.

For more information visit http://www.edenproject.com

Lost Gardens of Heligan

The award winning Lost Gardens of Heligan, asleep for more than seventy years, are the scene of the largest garden restoration project in Europe.

In the spring of 1991, the Gardens of Heligan lay under a blanket of bramble, ivy, rampant laurel and fallen timber. A year later, the restoration team opened the gardens to enable the public to share in the excitement of their discovery. In the northern gardens are two and a half miles of footpaths, an Elizabethan mount, rockeries, summer houses, a crystal grotto, an Italian garden, a fine set of bee-boles, a wishing well and a superb collection of walled gardens. Remarkably much of the original plant collection has survived, sometimes to record sizes.

To the south lies “Lost Valley” and “The Jungle”, a sub-tropical valley overlooking the picturesque fishing harbour of Mevagissey, and overflowing with palms, tree ferns, bamboos, gunnera and numerous exotic trees and shrubs. If The Secret Garden and Peter Rabbit captured your childhood imagination, then Heligan will not disappoint you. The story boards make the visit interesting even to the non-gardener!

Open every day of the year
(except Christmas Eve & Christmas Day)
Main season:- 10am-6pm (last tickets 4-30pm)
Winter:- 10am-5pm (last tickets 3-30pm)

Charlestown

1 mile south east of St Austell off the A390

This was originally a small fishing village called West Polmear. In the 1790’s a local mine owner Charles Rashleigh built a harbour here to support the growing china clay industry and also for the importing of coal.

Today, this harbour and village remains a Georgian time capsule. As well as providing a permanent berth for square-rigged boats, it is a popular destination with holidaymakers and was also used as the location for both the Poldark and The Onedin Line television series.

Close to the docks, and housed in a historic clay building, is the Charlestown Shipwreck, Rescue and Heritage Centre, with, underneath, the tunnels which took the clay too and from the harbour. The centre offers an insight into the town’s history, local shipwrecks and the various devices that have been developed over the years for rescuing and recovering those in peril at sea.

For more information visit www.shipwreckcharlestown.com

These are but a few suggestions from The Cottles as to what you can enjoy on your holiday in Cornwall, why not visit the Cornish Tourist Board's website for a comprehensive guide to holiday attractions www.cornwalltouristboard.co.uk