For stunning and varied scenery and an extraordinary range of historic and cultural sites, South West England has few rivals.

Whether you want general sightseeing, a walking and hiking tour or one that focuses on a special interest, we hope the following brief descriptions and web links will whet your appetite and inspire you to explore this beautiful and fascinating region with us.

Cornwall

With over three hundred miles of spectacular cliffs and headlands, sandy beaches and secluded coves, Cornwall is dominated by the sea. Nearly every inlet shelters a traditional fishing village with old fish cellars, granite harbour and often a lifeboat station.

Places like Mousehole, Polperro, Portloe and Port Isaac still evoke tales of smugglers and wreckers, generations of precarious and dangerous livelihoods and heroic sea rescue. Cornwall’s maritime connections can also be traced in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth which houses the national small boat collection, Pendennis and St Mawes castles and the restored lighthouses at Pendeen and Lizard Point.

Inland, the wild and remote granite tors and uplands of West Penwith and Bodmin Moor are littered with prehistoric remains. They include Neolithic burial chambers or quoits at Trethevy and Lanyon, the Hurlers and the Merry Maidens stone circles, the holed stone at the Men-an-Tol and hundreds of Bronze Age settlements with round houses and field systems as at Roughtor and Stowes Hill.

Cornwall is unique in England for retaining elements of Celtic culture including a revived language. The Celtic past can be seen in Iron Age hillforts and cliff castles, such as Castel-an-Dinas and the Rumps, and the Romano-Cornish villages of Carn Euny and Chysauster with their distinctive courtyard houses. The Celtic church left a legacy of village place names, inscribed stones, holy wells and decorated crosses. From the royal Celtic citadel high up on the cliffs at Tintagel, later rebuilt as a medieval castle, originate Cornwall’s numerous associations with tales about King Arthur.

Travelling around this rural county today it takes a leap of imagination to picture Cornwall as it was during the industrial revolution - the world’s leading producer of tin and copper.

Now internationally recognised as a World Heritage Site, the history and culture associated with Cornish mining and the industrial past can be discovered at numerous sites including Geevor Tin Mine, Blue Hills tin streaming works, Wheal Martyn China Clay Country Park.

The wealth generated by mining is reflected in the magnificent domestic and civic Georgian and Victorian architecture of towns like Penzance and Truro. Truro’s splendid late Victorian Anglican Cathedral was the first to be built in England since Wren designed St Paul’s.

During the 18th and 19th century leading families began to establish sub tropical gardens stocked with rare and exotic plants gathered from around the world and which thrived in Cornwall’s temperate climate.

The plant collections at Caerhays, Trebah and Trewithen are internationally renowned.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan, deserted after the gardeners went to fight in the First World War, have been recreated in Europe’s largest garden restoration project.

The county’s stately homes include the converted castle perched dramatically at the top of St Michael’s Mount, the intimate charm of the Tudor manor at Cotehele and Lanhydrock, one of England’s most complete late 19th century houses.

It is little wonder that Cornwall’s rugged beauty and unique history have inspired poets and novelists including John Betjemen, Daphne du Maurier, Winston Graham, Thomas Hardy and Rosamund Pilcher. Many of the places associated with them are readily accessible to anyone willing to venture a little off the beaten track.

Artists too have been attracted to Cornwall. The Newlyn School’s depictions of rural life are displayed at the Penlee House Museum and Art Gallery in Penzance while abstract and modern art can be viewed in St Ives at the Tate Gallery and the Barbara Hepworth Museum. The Cornish are also proud of their musical traditions. In the summer months harbourside male voice choirs and silver band concerts are popular events with locals and visitors alike.

Drake’s Devon and Dartmoor

South and West Devon, from Exeter to the river Tamar’s border with Cornwall, is a land of contrasts.

The coastline affords breathtaking views over sweeping sands, precipitous cliffs and airy promontories indented with secretive, steeply wooded estuaries. Associated with adventurers and explorers like Drake, Raleigh, Scott of the Antarctic and solo yachtsman Francis Chichester, Devon has played a key role in maritime history including the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the settlement of North America, D-Day and the Cold War. Sir Francis Drake’s residence at Buckland Abbey can be visited as can the fortified medieval manor house of Compton Castle, home to the coloniser of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and still occupied by the family after 600 years.

In Plymouth the Barbican’s narrow streets and jettied Tudor buildings still retain something of the atmosphere from the days of the Tudor and Stuart seafarers. Nearby are the Mayflower Steps commemorating the Pilgrims’ departure for Massachusetts in 1620. Plymouth’s naval dockyard can be viewed by taking a boat trip as can several of the South Devon estuaries. At Dartmouth the castle guards the narrow entrance to the river which shelters the ancient port, 17th century merchants’ houses testify to the wealth generated by centuries of trade and naval officers continue to be trained at the imposing Britannia Royal Naval College.

Inland, the Dartmoor National Park, whose emblem is the famous pony, occupies 368 square miles (953 sq. km ) of wooded valleys and high moorland with weathered granite tors. The setting for legends which inspired Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles and often described as southern England’s last wilderness, high Dartmoor’s fascination derives from its combination of wild beauty and solitude and the evidence for five thousand years of human activity. The moor is one of Europe’s best preserved landscapes for prehistoric archaeology with late Neolithic stone circles and rows as at Grey Weathers, Drizzlecombe and Merrivale, Bronze Age settlements like Grimspound and miles of low banks called reaves which were laid out over 2000 years ago to enclose and divide some 25,000 acres of open countryside. From the medieval period there are longhouses, where animals and people lived within the same dwelling, and deserted villages like Hound Tor. Dartmoor’s wealth of industrial archaeology includes tin mining since the Middle Ages, quarrying and the Haytor granite railway.

Below the high open moorland the scenery is characterised by sharply incised river valleys, rolling hills and a colourful patchwork of small fields. High sided lanes with banks and hedgerows abundant with wild flowers in spring and summer lead to ancient villages of stone or cob and thatch such as Buckland in the Moor, Holne, Lustleigh and Widecombe, many dating back to medieval times.

Among the attractive and vibrant market towns Totnes, with many Tudor and Stuart houses and a well preserved motte and bailey castle with shell keep, has been described by the doyen of architectural history, Nikolaus Pevsner, as “one of the most rewarding small towns in England.”

Distinctively Victorian Tavistock, Drake’s birthplace and site of a major medieval abbey, was rebuilt in the 19th century from the profits of Tamar Valley copper mining, the history of which can be explored at the restored port and living history museum at Morwellham Quay.

Exeter has been Devon’s administrative capital since Roman times. The city’s great architectural variety reflects the city’s evolution as medieval ecclesiastical centre, major cloth producer and riverside port which ranked among the richest towns in England in the 15th to 18th centuries, and genteel Georgian county town. The jewel in the city’s crown is the Cathedral. One of the best examples of the Decorated style, it boasts the longest unbroken Gothic ceiling in the world. Exeter’s other highlights include the unique medieval underground passages which supplied the city’s water, the medieval guildhall, sensitively restored quayside and streets and houses designed for the medieval clergy, Tudor merchants and fashionable Georgian society.

Devon’s country houses include Berry Pomeroy Castle, a romantic ruin steeped in local legend, 14th century Dartington Hall which was rescued from dereliction by the American heiress Dorothy Elmhirst, Georgian Saltram with lavish Robert Adam interiors and Lutyens’ early 20th century combination of granite fortress and modern home at Castle Drogo. Sheltered estuaries and river valleys provide favourable micro-climates for some of Devon’s most beautiful gardens. The art deco house with exotic garden at Coleton Fishacre was home to Rupert D’Oyly Carte, founder of the opera company associated with Gilbert and Sullivan. Naturalistic planting centred on the walled garden at the Garden House was created by an enthusiastic plant collector after 1945. Greenway on the river Dart was the home of Agatha Christie who came from Torbay and set several of her novels in the area.

Historic and Literary Wessex

Wessex is the creation of history and imagination, the Saxon kingdom of Alfred the Great which Thomas Hardy reinvented as the fictional setting for his novels’ celebration of English country life.

Wessex extends across the ancient rural counties of Berkshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset and includes some of England’s most appealing and interesting historic cities in Bath, Bristol, Salisbury, Wells and Winchester. Enigmatic prehistoric monuments and carved chalk figures inhabit a landscape immersed in folklore and Arthurian associations. The diverse scenery encompasses England’s first Natural World Heritage Site along the Jurassic Coast, limestone Cheddar Gorge, reclaimed wetlands in the Somerset Levels and the New Forest’s managed woods and heathland. But the heart of Wessex are the chalk downs where rolling waves of hills break as steep scarps over vales harbouring unspoilt villages and handsome market towns.

The chalk uplands contain the ceremonial, defensive and religious prehistoric monuments for which Wessex is internationally famous. The best known are the Neolithic and Bronze Age World Heritage Sites centred on Stonehenge and Avebury together with Silbury Hill and the West Kennet long barrow.

But there are many other rewarding sites scattered across the region such as Knowlton, where a Norman chapel stands inside Neolithic earthworks, and the enigmatic late Bronze Age white horse carved from the chalk hillside at Uffington on the edge of the Berkshire Downs.

Prehistoric artefacts ranging from pottery and tools to exquisite jewellery are displayed at the museums in Devizes and Salisbury. Iron Age Celtic civilisation can be explored among the massive ramparts of Maiden Castle, Europe’s largest hillfort, or at Danebury hillfort where twenty years’ excavation provided the exhibits for the Museum of the Iron Age in Andover. Agrarian life in the Iron Age is depicted in the replica village at Butser Ancient Farm and the reconstructions in the Somerset Levels and Peat Moor Centre.

The inquisitive traveller who takes the time to meander through the back roads and gentle countryside of lowland Wessex can trace rural England’s evolution over two thousand years. At Rockbourne and Littlecote fabulous mosaics have been uncovered in the remains of Roman villas. Among the fields at Silchester a museum, amphitheatre and a circuit of walls still standing some 13 feet (4 metres ) high mark the atmospheric site of one of Roman Britain’s major towns. Centuries of country life and traditions are evident across the region in countless picture book villages with their green, pond, lock-up, pub, manor house, church and school. Many retain a layout and buildings dating back to the Middle Ages when the Wessex economy flourished due to the wool trade.

The rustic charms of cottages built in limestone, herringbone brick and timber, chalk, flint and thatch contrast with the formality of important parish churches, such as Avington, Breamore, East Meon, Edington, Nether Wallop and Steeple Ashton, which span all major architectural periods since the Anglo-Saxons.

The epitome of the feudal village is the National Trust’s Lacock where half timbered and stone houses are presided over by a stately home which incorporates the medieval abbey’s 13th century cloisters.

Notable market towns include Bradford on Avon, with its Saxon church and massive medieval tithe barn, and Marlborough which claims one of the finest high streets in England.

Devizes is home to the Kennet and Avon Canal Trust Museum and the canal’s 16 locks at nearby Caen Hill are regarded as one of the wonders of 18th century engineering. Glastonbury, dominated by the famous tor above the drained marshes of the Somerset Levels and by the substantial ruins of one of medieval England’s most powerful abbeys, is associated with Celtic Christianity and Arthurian legend as is the nearby hillfort at South Cadbury which popular folklore has often identified as Camelot.

Wells, England’s smallest city, has the country’s first Gothic Cathedral, best known for the stunning west front which is decorated with over three hundred carved figures, and a walled and moated medieval bishops’ palace.

Wessex has some of Britain’s most significant historic houses. Uniquely hexagonal Old Wardour Castle, whose lakeside setting makes it one of the country’s most beautiful castle ruins, was designed as a secure but luxurious residence in the 14th century. Well preserved medieval manor houses include fortified Great Chalfield and Westwood which was remodelled in the Tudor and Jacobean periods. Great houses renowned for their architectural interest, sumptuous interiors and excellent art collections include masterpieces of the Elizabethan Renaissance at Montacute and Longleat, the Queen Anne mansion at Kingston Lacy and Palladian Wilton House for which Inigo Jones designed the fabulous Single and Double Cube rooms. At the extravagant Victorian Gothic-Revival Tyntesfield most of the 19th century interior and furnishings survive intact including servants’ quarters and an unrivalled collection of Victorian decorative arts.

World famous gardens range from the broad green vistas of landscaped parks surrounding the great houses to the riot of colour and scent in more intimate cottage gardens. At 18th century Stourhead neoclassical grottoes, bridges and temples are glimpsed across the lake as the visitor walks through a mixed woodland of exotic and indigenous trees. Hestercombe is unique in having three complete period gardens: Georgian pleasure grounds with lakes, temples and woods, a Victorian terrace and exemplary formal Edwardian gardens designed by Lutyens and Jekyll. The splendid medieval monastery and country house of Forde Abbey is set among award winning gardens featuring herbaceous borders, woodland planting, bog and rock plants. The Italianate Peto Garden at Iford Manor is distinguished by terraces, columnar cypresses and a vast collection of statues and urns. At East Lambrook Manor informal planting creates a rich tapestry of colour and texture in the style pioneered by Margery Fish over fifty years ago at what is often claimed as the home of the cottage garden.

Wessex is closely associated with two of England’s best loved writers, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. The core of Hardy’s Wessex is West Dorset. Both of Hardy’s main homes are open to the public: Hardy’s Cottage at Higher Bockhampton, the isolated cottage where he was born, lived intermittently as a young man and wrote his early novels, and Max Gate, which he designed and occupied for 43 years during which he wrote his later novels and most of his poetry. Hardy’s heart is buried alongside his two wives in the churchyard at Stinsford. In his novels Hardy constructed a fictional region based upon places he knew intimately and which he partially disguised with invented names.

Dorchester (“Casterbridge”) features regularly and is worth visiting for its architecture, the mosaic floor in the foundations of Britain’s sole surviving Roman town house, the Roman amphitheatre within the Neolithic henge at Maumbury Rings and Hardy memorabilia at the Dorset County Museum. Hardy’s countryside, with its undulating hills, gentle streams and leafy lanes passing through villages of cob, limestone and thatch cottages, invites leisurely exploration.

It does not require encyclopaedic knowledge of the novels to appreciate the charms of places like cobbled Gold Hill in Shaftesbury (“Shaston”), Marnhull (“Marlott” where Tess of the d’Urbervilles was born) or Puddletown (“Weatherbury”) and its wonderful and rare 17th century church interior. Hardy’s Wessex is the product of an imagination rooted in an historic landscape: Athelhampton manor house, the romantic ruins of Corfe Castle, the fabulous fan vaulting at Sherborne Abbey and the enormous, club wielding naked giant sculpted in the chalk hillside above Cerne Abbas.

The centre of Jane Austen’s world was Georgian Hampshire’s rural society, which inspired both the settings for her novels and the characters whose social mores she so acutely and wittily observed. A few miles from Winchester is the simple Norman church at Steventon, the tiny hamlet where Jane’s father was rector and she lived until she was 25. Two hundred years later it is still possible to retrace Jane’s steps through tranquil countryside and the unspoilt neighbouring villages which have, in many respects, changed little since she and her sister Cassandra took their regular walks together, visited their wide circle of friends and attended social gatherings at large country houses like The Vyne. Jane’s last home, an unostentatious red brick house in the pretty village of Chawton where she completed all her novels, is now a museum exhibiting period costumes, a recreated 18th century garden, first editions and personal items such as her writing table, jewellery and donkey carriage. Jane Austen died in rented rooms in College Street, Winchester, where she was staying to be near her physician, and is buried in the cathedral’s north aisle. Other places with important Jane Austen connections include the spectacular fossil bearing cliffs along the Natural World Heritage Site of the Jurassic Coast around Lyme Regis and its famous cobb, which is described in Persuasion, and Bath where she lived for six years.

Historic Cities - Bath, Winchester, Salisbury, Bristol

Roman and Georgian Bath is the only British city to enjoy World Heritage Site status. The Romans built the town in the 1st century AD around Britain’s only naturally occurring hot springs, which had been venerated by the Celts, and called it Aqua Sulis meaning “waters of Sul” after the Celtic goddess of wisdom. The extensive and well preserved Roman baths and adjoining temple are one of the wonders of the ancient world. During the medieval and Tudor periods, when Bath was an important wool town, the hot springs were administered by the church on behalf of the Crown.

The main surviving building from this period is the abbey with its splendid Perpendicular Gothic façade and fan vaulting. Bath’s heyday was in the 18th century when the spring water’s therapeutic properties attracted the wealthy and influential who transformed the city into the fashionable spa which Jane Austen described in her novels.

Growing prestige was accompanied by an architectural renaissance. Italianate Pulteney Bridge and elegant classical town houses and crescents built in golden Bath limestone, most famously in Queen Square, the Circus and Royal Crescent, are the supreme example of Georgian architecture and urban planning.

The interior of No. 1 Royal Crescent has been restored as have the Assembly Rooms which house the world famous Museum of Costume. The city’s evolution is explained in the Building of Bath Museum and the Jane Austen Centre depicts the life and times of Bath’s most famous resident.

Winchester was one of medieval England’s greatest cities: capital of King Alfred the Great’s Wessex and later of England, residence for the Anglo-Norman kings and rival to London, centre of pilgrimage and scholarship, seat of bishops who wielded formidable power in the political as well as the spiritual realm. The glorious history of what is today Hampshire’s compact and pleasant county town is exemplified by the Cathedral. Europe’s longest medieval church is composed of all major styles from Romanesque to Perpendicular. Outstanding features include a superbly decorated Norman Tournai marble font, 12th century wall paintings, Europe’s most impressive set of early 14th century wooden choir stalls and misericords which are exquisitely and often humorously carved with human figures and animals, elaborate 15th century chantry chapels and the 12th century Winchester Bible illuminated in gold leaf and lapis lazuli. Winchester’s remarkable architectural heritage also includes the Close and its monastic buildings, the Great Hall which houses a medieval representation of King Arthur’s Round Table, the extensive ruin of the bishops’ lavish palace at Wolvesey Castle, Winchester College which is England’s oldest public school, the Kingsgate and Westgate, and the Hospital of St Cross which some claim inspired the setting for Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Warden.

Salisbury developed as a planned medieval new town around a new cathedral in the 13th century. This led to the abandonment of the former town at Old Sarum, an atmospheric site overlooking the present city where the remains of a Norman castle and cathedral lie within the ramparts of an imposing Iron Age hillfort. Many visitors’ abiding memory of Salisbury is the view, so graphically represented in John Constable’s well known painting, of the Cathedral rising majestically above the water meadows. The body of the Cathedral was completed in the Early English style in just 38 years at the beginning of the 13th century and is unique for its architectural unity. It is graced by the spire, a later addition which at 404 feet/123 metres is the world’s tallest medieval structure, houses an original copy of the Magna Carta and Europe’s oldest working clock, and stands within England’s largest Close ringed by expansive lawns and an eclectic range of buildings spanning eight centuries. Salisbury’s central streets retain their original layout with names like Fish Row and Salt Lane and are lined with half timber houses and inns.

Nowhere outside London offers more compelling insights into Britain’s maritime and imperial history than Bristol, embarkation point for voyages of discovery to North America, England’s second most important town for some four hundred years and the country’s main transatlantic port in the 17th and 18th centuries trading in goods such as sugar, tobacco and slaves. The award winning British Empire & Commonwealth Museum imaginatively and sensitively presents 500 years of empire and its legacy through a wide range of perspectives from imperial administrators to freedom fighters. During the 19th century Bristol declined because the port was unable to berth increasingly large ships. Today the historic dock area has been transformed into an attractive and lively mix of waterside cafes, shops and art galleries. Visitors can board a replica of the Matthew, the ship on which John Cabot became the first European conclusively to land in North America when he sailed to Newfoundland in 1497. Brunel’s SS Great Britain, which is being restored, was the world’s first screw propelled, ocean going, wrought iron ship and carried over 15000 emigrants to Australia. Bristol’s striking architectural legacy includes the Romanesque and Decorated Gothic Cathedral which is a unique example in England of a “hall church”, the famous Perpendicular parish church of St Mary Redcliffe, the world’s oldest Methodist chapel at John Wesley’s New Room, Georgian Royal York Crescent and Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge.

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November 2007