Great Lantic Beach

A blue skies day, today. After a million miles of single-track lanes and a short walk, you hit the coastal path, and breathtaking views of a magnificent coastline bathed in sunshine. Far below, the larger of the two Lantic beaches glistens invitingly, pristine sand against the greens and blues of the surrounding landscape. There are lots of steps down, but here you find a beach worth staying on all day. The rising tide cuts off the smaller coves at one end, but leaves other terraced sections to sunbathe on...

Lansallos Cove

Lansallos is another of those small secret beaches that you might live a lifetime and not find. The sea has sculpted an almost perfect scallop-shell beach out of the surrounding slate rock, and filled it with soft grey sand. All day, clouds hurtle fast across the sky bringing intermittent downpours sprinkled with patchy sunshine; but sitting here it just feels calm and sheltered, and it doesn't seem to matter so much what's happening anywhere else...

Porthilly Cove

Damp brown beech leaves on the grass at home announce the arrival of autumn in Cornwall; the nights begin to close in. From Porthilly beach you can see two popular summer resorts - Padsstow sits to the left across the water while fashionable Rock is just to the right. But today Porthilly beach itself has a sodden, unloved feel about it, and the silvery autumn sun sometimes breaks through the clouds only to suck the colours out of the landscape...

Pentireglaze Haven (east cove)

Nearby, the fashionable Polzeath beach is crowded with surfers today. But walk eastwards along the coast path and you soon come to the two coves of Pentireglaze Haven, strangely quiet and deserted. This is the smaller, unnamed, of the two. The approaches from Polzeath on the cliff-tops give stunning views of this whole stretch of coastline, the strong onshore wind scattering white messy surf all over Hayle Bay. But the breeze is still warm for this time of year and you can just sit for hours on the rocks or the grassy banks, watching the shifting sunlight playing on the waves.

Portloe (East Cove)

You can easily miss this this little beach, as I often have before today. But such a waste! Walk along an inconspicuous footpath east of the harbour and soon you can clamber down some stone steps to reach this cove in a lovely private setting. In contrast to Portloe's harbour cove, I could easily linger here till the rising tide forces me back up...

Portloe: postscript

Here is an example of how light, weather, time of day, personal inclinations and other circumstances all shape the published image, here is one I 'snapped' today, so diffeent from yesterday, as an afterthought...

Portloe

Portloe is a tiny shingly cove that provides a small drying harbour of sorts for local fishing boats. Strong with the smell of the sea, it is usually cluttered with small craft and piles of fish trays and lobster pots. Not a beach for lingering on, but you can walk along the rocky cliffs overlooking the cove on either side. It is easy to find places to sit and enjoy the ridiculous blue that is splashed over all this seascape in the strange September weather that persists, despite today's blustery winds...

Porthleven Sands

Last week's indian summer seems finally to have ended. With today's clouds and the shifting light, walking along this long stretch of sandy beach brings you stunning views and colours each minute. What few walkers you meet soon disappear around some rocks and the whole place feels deserted again. In the distance, the Lizard marks England's southernmost point where, sailing west, you begin really to feel the open sea turn into the Atlantic

Watergate Bay (Revisited)

Watergate was the very first beach of this project, and the only one I have revisited. After a summer of foreign coasts and a series of small rocky coves, I make no apology for this repetition; it is a great joy to walk along the gentle water's edge of this beach again, its tall cliffs still shrouded in last night's mists and its sand seeming to stretch out miles into the haze...

Lundy Bay (East Cove)

Lundy Bay is dotted with a few tiny rocky coves like this one. When the tide is fully out you may get a small patch of wet sand, but otherwise they are just a tumble of rocks. But those in the know come and spread themselves on the warm rocks on sunny days like today. The sea is calm and a ridiculously intense blue. Here, maybe more than anywhere else that I've seen on Cornwall's coast, people will just step off the rocks for a swim, some going even as far as the next cove around the corner. With the crowds gone, this late summer's day has a lazy, languid feel to it, borrowed time that no-one else will miss...

Great Molunan

Sail round the headland south from St. Mawes towards St. Anthony's lighthouse, and this is the beach you come to. Popular with boating families, by land it is reached only after a decent walk and a short scramble down a slate and granite slope. Today, the late summer sun lingers high high overhead in a cloudless sky, even as the afternoon draws on, and one by one the boats reluctantly raise anchor and head for home...

St. Anthony (unnamed cove)

It's already September, and more than 10 weeks since my last Cornish beach! Most of the holiday crowds seem already to have left Cornwall, disappointed with this year's wet and windy season. But here today, we enjoy an Indian summer. Sailboats are dotted all along this coast, some anchored just off several small coves approachable only by sea. This tiny one, reached by a scramble off the coast path, is just below St. Anthony's lighthouse, and completely deserted. Today the lighthouse is asleep in the sun; and standing alone on the rocks and this peaceful bit of sand uncovered by the tide I know for sure that neither the famed Amalfi coast nor the Red Sea resorts have anything to compare with these beaches of home...