Cornwall's harbours are small, steep and stubborn, built where a stream met the sea and there was just enough shelter for a fleet of pilchard boats. Most of the fleets have gone; the harbours have not. These are the ones we have drawn so far, from the south coast round to the north.
Polperro and Looe
Polperro is the one people mean when they say Cornish fishing village: a harbour you can almost step across, cottages piled up both sides of the valley, and no cars past the top car park. We have four designs, including the harbour with its boats in and the harbour mouth from the coast path with the sea thrift out.
Looe, a few miles east, is the bigger working harbour, with a fish market and a beach in the town.
Mevagissey and St Mawes
Mevagissey has two harbours, an inner and an outer, and still lands fish every morning. St Mawes sits across the Fal from Falmouth at the tip of the Roseland, with a Henry VIII castle on the point and a harbour front of pastel houses that gets the evening sun.
Mousehole
Pronounced Mowzel, and the prettiest harbour on the south coast by a distance. The granite harbour walls close almost completely in winter, when the baulks go in against the storms and the village lights go up over the water. Our design is the harbour in summer, with the boats resting on the sand at low tide.
St Ives and Carbis Bay
St Ives is the busiest of them, an artists' town since Whistler and Sickert came for the light, with the Tate and the Barbara Hepworth garden to show for it. The harbour beach, the lifeboat slip and Smeaton's Pier are what we have drawn, and Carbis Bay's white sand is a mile along the coast path.
Port Isaac and Padstow
On the north coast, Port Isaac is the slate-hung village of Doc Martin and the Fisherman's Friends, with a harbour that empties to a slipway at low water. Padstow, on the Camel estuary, is the harbour of Rick Stein and the May Day 'Obby 'Oss, and the ferry across to Rock.
Every Cornish harbour in the catalogue is on the Cornwall page, with the surf beaches at Newquay, Perranporth and Watergate Bay for good measure.
