The famous ones get the crowds. These are the ones the fishermen kept for themselves.
Cornwall has always had two faces.
One side is the postcard image: Padstow, St Ives, Port Isaac. All are beautiful, but over Time, they have changed. Cafes keep popping up, and more homes are bought as holiday getaways. These days, there are more leisure boats than fishing boats. Often, the ‘catch of the day’ comes from a wholesaler.
Then there is the other side of Cornwall. It is smaller, quieter, and a bit further away. Here, crab pots are still stacked on the slipway, ready to go out the next day. The pub has stayed the same for two hundred years, and the landlord knows everyone. On an October day, you might stand on the harbour wall and hear only the water and the wind.
These seven places are part of that quieter Cornwall. Most visitors never make it to them, and that is exactly why they are special.
Quick Facts
- Theme: Old fishing villages, Cornish coast
- Best Time to Visit: Late September to early November. The light is beautiful, the car parks are empty, and you can really hear the sea.
- Perfect For: Walkers, those who want to understand what Cornwall actually was, people who like a quiet pint
- Tip: Most of these villages have narrow lanes and little or no parking. Park at the top and walk down. It’s worth it. You’ll be glad you did.
1. Cadgwith, The Lizard Peninsula
📍 Plan your visit →Two rough granite posts with rounded boulders on top mark the entrance to Cadgwith. They make you feel like you are stepping back in Time to a community that has stayed the same for centuries.
That is no exaggeration. Cadgwith is the best-preserved fishing village on the Lizard Peninsula, and maybe in all of Cornwall. It started in medieval times as fish cellars in a sheltered valley with a shingle cove, protected from the southwest winds. People have lived here since the sixteenth century, and some original stone-and-thatch houses remain.
The boats are still here, and fishermen still work from the cove, bringing in crab and lobster. In 1904, they landed a record 1,798,000 pilchards in just four days. The pilchards are gone, but the village’s way of life remains. Crab pots rest against the walls, and trucks back down the slipway. This is not a village putting on a show for visitors. It is a real place where people live.
A short walk north brings you to the Devil’s Frying Pan, an enormous hollow in the cliffs where the roof of a sea cave collapsed. The coastal path in both directions is excellent and largely empty out of season.
- 🏡 Where to Stay: Cadgwith Cove Inn is over 300 years old, with seven rooms updated in 2024, right on the slipway. On Friday evenings, you can hear the Cadgwith Singers perform sea shanties in the bar. Be sure to book ahead.
- 🕰️ Worth Knowing: Cadgwith was featured in the 2004 film Ladies in Lavender, with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The filmmakers picked it because, as they said, it looked unchanged since the 1930s. They were right.
2. Portloe, The Roseland Peninsula
📍 Plan your visit → The Lugger Hotel
Sir John Betjeman called Portloe “one of the least spoiled and most impressive of Cornish fishing villages.” That was many years ago, and it is still true today.
Portloe sits at the bottom of a steep valley on the west side of Veryan Bay. You get there by a lane that is just wide enough for one car. The name comes from the Cornish ‘Porth Logh,’ meaning ‘cove pool,’ which fits its sheltered spot. Thanks to this, the village grew in the 17th and 18th centuries into a pilchard-fishing port, with more than 50 boats working the rough Cornish waters.
The pilchards brought in only a small income. High taxes on salt for curing led local farmers and fishermen to smuggle goods instead. French brandy was brought into the harbour and hidden in cellars. The custom house built to stop smuggling is now a holiday cottage, but you can still see its original shape.
Today, only two fishing boats work out of the cove, catching lobster and crab. The valleys around Portloe have kept it safe from modern development. Its 17th and 18th-century buildings are almost unchanged. The Lugger Hotel stands by the water where a smuggler’s inn once was, and the Ship Inn is up the hill. There is not much else, and that is exactly what makes it special.
- Where to stay: The Lugger Hotel, Portloe, Cornwall’s only AA Five Star Inn, a 17th-century smuggler’s building right on the water. Twenty rooms, a two-rosette restaurant, and lobster caught that morning by the two boats you can see from the dining room.
- 🕰️ Worth Knowing: Portloe has been used as a filming location many times, and locals are used to seeing cameras in the harbour. The Disney film Treasure Island was shot here in 1949. The 2012 Richard Curtis film About Time was filmed nearby. The BBC series Wild West used Portloe as the fictional village of St Gweep.
3. Coverack, The Lizard Peninsula
📍 Plan your visit → Coverack Village
Coverack sits on the eastern shore of the Lizard Peninsula, facing a bay that has seen more shipwrecks than anyone can count. The harbour was built in 1724 from local green serpentine and hornblende for the growing pilchard fleet. The harbour wall is still there, made of the same stones and the same colour called the Manacles, which make up one of Britain’s most notorious stretches of coastline. Dozens of ships have wrecked here over the centuries. Now, the reef is a popular diving site. The roads to Coverack cross Goonhilly Downs, famous for the BT satellite earth station. It is an odd juxtaposition. You pass the enormous dishes and then drop into a village from another century.
Coverack has charming thatched cottages with brightly painted doors and a lovely harbour. Fishing boats still head out from here, and the pub has one of the best names in Cornwall.
- 🏡 Where to Stay: The Paris Hotel, Coverack, the village’s only pub and hotel, built in 1907 and named after the SS Paris, a liner that ran aground on the headland in 1899. Six rooms, all with sea views, and a restaurant with three windows facing the water. The menu changes daily and leads with whatever was caught that morning.
- 🕰️ Worth Knowing: The same rocks that wrecked the SS Paris have caused shipwrecks for centuries. Not long ago, locals could name the ships by the kind of wreckage that washed up on the beach.
4. Zennor, West Penwith
📍 Plan your visit → Tinners Arms
Zennor is not a fishing village in the usual sense. There is no harbour, and you reach the sea by climbing down the cliffs. Still, fishing has always been part of life here. Zennor is included because it is one of the most remarkable places in Cornwall, period.
In the late 1700s, Zennor was one of the last places where people spoke Cornish. Today, the village feels like a time capsule. The church is Norman, and the pub was built in 1271. With only about 200 people, Zennor is centred around its lovely church. Inside St Senara’s Church, you’ll find a mermaid carved into a pew. The legend says a beautiful woman came every Sunday to hear a young man sing. One night, he followed her voice to the sea and was never seen again. She became known as the Mermaid of Zennor.
The Tinners Arms is a Grade II listed pub with low beams, stone floors, and firelight. DH Lawrence stayed here for two weeks in 1916 and wrote: “Zennor is a most beautiful place: a tiny granite village nestling under high shaggy moor-hills and a big sweep of lovely sea beyond, such a lovely sea, lovelier even than the Mediterranean.”
- 🏡 Where to Stay: The White House B&B, Zennor, a Grade II listed building next door to the Tinners Arms, run by the same family. Breakfast is prepared by the Tinners’ chef. You can walk to the coast path in minutes.
- 🕰️ Worth Knowing: Walk fifteen minutes up the hill from the village to reach Zennor Quoit, a 5,500-year-old prehistoric burial chamber. It is one of the best in Cornwall, and hardly anyone visits.
5. Penberth Cove, West Penwith
📍 Plan your visit → Explore Cornwall
Penberth has no pub, no café, no shop, and barely any phone signal. There is just a granite cobblestone slipway, a wooden capstan once used to haul boats out of the water, and a small fleet of fishing boats that still use it.
Penberth Cove is one of the few remaining traditional fishing spots in the area. Here, boats are still hauled in by hand with a winch. The cove has hardly changed overTimee, giving you a real look at Cornwall’s fishing past. The car park is about five minutes away. The cove is sheltered enough for swimming around high tide. The water is extraordinarily clear. The village around the cove has remained relatively unchanged, with granite cottages and narrow lanes. Fishing still matters here, though on a smaller scale.
Penberth was featured in several episodes of the BBC’s Poldark series. The production team chose it because it looked like an untouched 18th-century fishing hamlet, and they were right.
- 🏡 Where to Stay: The Logan Rock Inn, Treen, a 16th-century pub in the hamlet of Treen, a five-minute walk from Penberth Cove. Real ales, open fires, and home-cooked food. The nearest comfortable base for visiting the cove.
- 🕰️ Worth Knowing: The capstan on the slipway is one of the few remaining working examples in Cornwall. Boats are now winched up using an electric motor, but the capstan itself is the same one that has stood here for generations.
6. Boscastle, North Cornwall
📍 Plan your visit → National Trust
Boscastle is on the north Cornish coast, five miles from Tintagel. It sits in a natural harbour so narrow that the sea enters through a sharp bend in the cliffs. Most of the village and the surrounding land are owned by the National Trust.
The harbour was once a busy port trading with Bristol, Wales, and southern England. Now, it is a quiet spot for small fishing boats. The harbour walls date back to medieval times. The cottages up the valley are mostly slate and whitewashed, and on a grey, windy day, Boscastle feels as remote as anywhere in England.
In August 2004, flash floods hit the village hard. Walls fell, cars were swept into the harbour, and buildings collapsed. The floods caused extensive damage, especially to the old thatched cottages. Thankfully, they were saved and rebuilt. Today, you would hardly notice anything had happened. The National Trust restored everything so well that their work is almost invisible, just as it should be.
The Witchcraft Museum has been here since 1960 and holds over 3,000 items about magic, rituals, and the occult. It is a serious collection in a serious building, and it is well worth a visit.
- 🏡 Where to Stay: The Old Rectory B&B, Boscastle, a Georgian rectory in the village where Thomas Hardy worked as an architect in 1870 and fell in love with Emma Gifford, who became his wife. Hardy set his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in the area. Six rooms, a garden, and a genuinely good breakfast.
- 🕰️ Worth Knowing: You can still take boat trips from Boscastle harbour to Long Island, where you can see razorbills, guillemots, and puffins from the water. Ask at the harbour for details.
7. Polruan, South-East Cornwall
📍 Plan your visit → Visit Cornwall
Polruan is the village that Fowey overlooks, sitting right across from its more famous neighbour at the mouth of the Fowey estuary. Most visitors take the ferry to Fowey, explore there, eat there, and then leave. They look across at Polruan and think there is nothing to see.
It has rather a lot to offer.
Polruan is a traditional, unspoiled village with a working boatbuilder on the quayside. The river is busy, and the steep hills can only be climbed on foot. The streets are too narrow for cars, and the lanes wind up from the waterfront past old fishermen’s cottages and stone walls covered in lichen. At the tip of the headland, there is a ruined blockhouse built in the 15th century to stretch a chain across the river mouth and close the harbour during wartime. The chain is gone, but the stones are still there.
The foot ferry to Fowey runs often, so you can enjoy the quiet of Polruan and still walk to the restaurants and shops in Fowey. It is one of the best setups in Cornwall.
- 🏡 Where to Stay: The Russell Inn, Polruan, a pub with rooms in the heart of the village, with views across the estuary to Fowey. Good food, a proper bar, and the kind of regulars who have been coming here for forty years.
- 🕰️ Worth Knowing: Daphne du Maurier lived and wrote in Fowey for much of her life. She described the estuary and the countryside around it in her novels, and Polruan appears in different ways throughout her work. The view from the blockhouse headland is the one she wrote about in Frenchman’s Creek.
Practical Tips
- Navigation: Most of these villages are reached by very narrow lanes with passing spots. Drive slowly and let others pass early. If you meet a local coming the other way, remember they know the road better than you.
- Parking: Always park at the top of the village and walk down. Cadgwith, Portloe, and Penberth have no parking inside the village. Boscastle and Polruan have car parks on the edge.
- Tides: Penberth and Cadgwith are best visited around high tide. The coves look quite different as the water drops.
- Walking: All seven are on or very close to the South West Coast Path. The path between Cadgwith and Coverack is particularly fine.
- Season: Early autumn is the bestTimee to visit. The summer crowds are gone, the villages feel like themselves again, and the light is just right.
Responsible Visiting
These are real working communities, not just for show. The fishermen in Cadgwith and Penberth are there because it is their job and their way of life, not just for the atmosphere.
Buy local whenever possible. Eat at the pub instead of bringing your own lunch. If you buy crab, get it from the fisherman who caught it. Park where you are supposed to, and do not block slipways or access roads. These places have lasted this long partly because people have respected them.
Reader Q&A
Which of these is the most visited?
Boscastle gets the most visitors because of the Witchcraft Museum and its proximity to Tintagel. Cadgwith is becoming increasingly popular among those seeking authentic Cornish fishing villages. The rest are still very quiet.
Which is the hardest to reach?
Penberth, which has no facilities and very little parking. That is also what makes it so special.
Are they worth visiting in winter?
All of them are worth visiting, though the Cadgwith Cove Inn has shorter hours from October to March. Call ahead before you go. In winter, these places are quieter and, in many ways, closer to how they have always been
Which has the best walking nearby?
Zennor and Boscastle. The coast path from Zennor to St Ives offers some of the best walking in England. The walk from Boscastle north to Tintagel is dramatic and usually quiet.
Where to Stay
- Cadgwith Cove Inn, Cadgwith
- The Lugger Hotel, Portloe, Portloe
- The Paris Hotel, Coverack
- The White House B&B, Zennor
- The Logan Rock Inn, Treen, near Penberth
- The Old Rectory, Boscastle
- The Russell Inn, Polruan
The well-known parts of Cornwall are popular for good reasons. But overTimee, that popularity has changed them into places that cater more to visitors than to fishermen.n.
The places on this list have not changed—at least not yet. Visit quietly, and leave them just as you found them.
Note: Before visiting, always check the Old Rectory Boscastle and Russell Inn Polruan directly to confirm current availability, as smaller properties sometimes change ownership or close seasonally.
