Simon Jenkins - South West England’s Best Views

The landscape of St Just is Cornwall apart, a bleak, dramatic graveyard of a place, as if County Durham had come south to die. Small groups of plain houses, chapels and workaday shops sit in an infertile terrain. Behind the village of Botallack a lane leads down to the sea, where the coast is a wilderness of bare rocks and beating waves. Vegetation thins and battered ruins appear, often through a thick sea mist. The ground heaves and dips towards the shore. Granite gives way to rusty shale. This is the land of tin.

The rocks of Botallack are a geologists paradise. Layers of copper, quartz, garnet, cobalt, uranium and arsenic were here exhaled through volcanic fissures. Lodes of molten earth ran vertically and diagonally, requiring an impenetrable nomenclature of metapelite hornfels and pegmatite dykes. The ground at our feet shimmers with metallic colour.

Celts and Romans mined these parts. In 1539 the historian John Norden wrote that Botallack was a little hamlet on the coaste of the Irishe sea most visited with tinners, where they lodge and feede. The need of the industrial revolution for tin and copper led to a boom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Botallack at its peak in the 1860s. The famous Boscawen diagonal shaft drove 400 feet down and half a mile out to sea from the Crowns mine.

The engine house and chimney of Crowns are reached by a vertiginous path down the cliff. Miners told of their terror at the sound of rocks rumbling in the surf above their heads. The experience attracted tourists, including Queen Victoria in 1846. The writer Wilkie Collins admitted to being petrified. Such was the popularity of the place that visitors were charged the then huge entry of half a guinea, to be used for the much-needed relief of deceased or incapacitated miners families.

The St Just coast to Cape Cornwall: shrines to the gods of rock

The arrival of cheap tin from Australia in the 1870s made Cornish tin less profitable. By the turn of the century Botallack had all but ceased production, its engines having to work ever harder to pump water from the shafts. The gaunt buildings began to disappear and today just thirteen engine houses survive. The Botallack group includes the old counting house, the ruin of an arsenic works with sheds and trackways. The Levant mine over the hill to the north lived on into the 1960s and Geevor until 1990. The latter is now a museum.

The best view of Botallack is from the cliff top a quarter of a mile north along the coast path, with a scramble down onto a cliffside slab. From here we can see the two cliffside engine houses of Crowns immediately below, with behind them the coast to Cape Cornwall and its offshore islands. The view is dotted with engine houses and chimneys, disused shrines to the gods of the rocks, reminding me of parts of Norfolk where ruined churches stretch to the horizon.

Here even the ubiquitous cliff heather seems meagre and halfhearted, as if admitting its defeat by geology. The rocks offshore are equally unforgiving. The marine floor along this coast is thick with wrecks, rich pickings for future archaeologists. Only the sky is alive, with cormorants circling like vultures, feeding on the history of the place.

At Carrick Roads every prospect pleases. The Scots would call this a sea loch, an enclosed expanse of calm water across which boats scurry in safety and the sea seems far away. At its entrance we can stand astride the battlements of Pendennis and look down on Falmouth. On its eastern shore we can walk the shoreline of St Mawes to the sub-tropical gardens of Roseland. We can snooze in the sun in Mylor churchyard.

Carrick Roads vies with Rio de Janeiro and Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the title of largest natural harbour in the world. It is a classic ria, or deep glacial valley, flooded after the ice age by the incoming sea. The outer bays have long offered refuge from Atlantic storms to sailing ships rounding the Lizard, guided by the lighthouse on St Anthony Head. Though steam mostly brought an end to this role, the Roads were used to shelter convoys in two world wars. Falmouth harbour has become the terminus for round-the-world sailors such as Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and Dame Ellen MacArthur.

The inland reaches become more intimate and exciting. The Roads dissolve into Restronguet Creek and the fjord-like inlet of the King Harry Ferry. These creeks are steep-sided and deep, ideal for mothballing container ships and tankers. An adjacent coastal lane offers surreal glimpses of maritime superstructures seemingly suspended in the trees. I have seen tankers moored here in a line astern, like victims of some bizarre GPS malfunction.

The best view of Carrick Roads is south from the Trelissick peninsula, where a meadow sweeps down to the waters edge, its convex curve creating a distant illusion of cows grazing amid bobbing masts and sails. Sky and glistening water are framed by tall trees. This is a place of peace.

Grass meets water meets sky: Trelissick towards Falmouth

From here the lie of the land has the Roads drifting out towards the sea, its shore bending gently from one side to the other like the shoulders of the ria it once was. To the right is the Feock peninsula, to the left Camerance Point. Next on the right is the creek of Mylor village, with the misty outline of the Fal estuary beyond. Each promontory slides easily into the water, crowned by trees. The only sign of life is the occasional yacht, attended by egrets, herons and grebes. Nothing is in a hurry.

On either side of the meadow lie the gardens of Trelissick House, oaks, beeches and pines interspersed with dense rhododendron, camellia and azalea. The garden is home to the national collection of photinia. More exotic species such as banana, palm and tree fern flourish inland.

Clovelly is famously attractive. A single cobbled street, known as Up-along, Down-along, stumbles down an isolated coastal ravine to a bay and small harbour. Public access is on foot (or donkey) and requires good legs and flat shoes. Residents have to haul their goods on sledges. They must have strong lungs.

Credit for preserving Clovelly goes to Christine Hamlyn, a former owner who restored the cottages in the 1930s and installed plumbing and lighting. Her initials adorn many of the buildings. The main street is attended by tiny courtyards through vaulted passages. There is no room for a square or church, other than a tiny chapel. Village business takes place where it always did, round the harbour below.