Zennor

You can walk to Zennor from St Ives along the coast path, which takes about three hours through scenery that dismantles your sense of being in England at all. The path hugs the clifftop above the Atlantic, crossing a headland where the granite outcrops have been worked by weather into shapes that look intentional — piled boulders, smooth faces, fins of rock standing vertical in the heather. The sea below is deep blue in summer and genuinely threatening in November. I’ve done the walk in both seasons and each time I reach Zennor I feel I’ve arrived somewhere that required being earned.

The village is small — a church, a pub, a handful of granite cottages — and it sits in a shallow valley between moorland and sea with the particular quality of a place that has always been peripheral to whatever England thought was happening. The church of St Senara has a carved wooden bench end depicting a mermaid, which is famous among people who collect such things and which is genuinely striking: she’s holding a mirror and a comb and looking directly at you with an expression of complete composure. The legend says she fell in love with a local chorister and dragged him into the sea.

The Tinners Arms, the village pub, is the kind of place that makes you understand what the word “pub” is supposed to mean: stone floors, a fire, Cornish ales, and food that takes the landscape seriously. The beef comes from cattle you can see in the fields beyond the window; the bread is made somewhere close. I ate a ploughman’s there — actually good cheese, proper chutney, bread that was still warm — and sat for an hour listening to the wind outside and a farming conversation inside that I couldn’t entirely follow.

D.H. Lawrence lived near here during the First World War, in a cottage he rented with Frieda, and wrote about this landscape with the intensity of someone genuinely disturbed by what it revealed about him. The Zennor Moor stretches east toward Penzance and is one of those places where you can walk for hours without seeing another person. I went out on a February afternoon and the sky was the color of pewter and the granite tors were the same color as the sky and for a while the horizon seemed to disappear.

When to go: Spring and early summer for the coastal wildflowers — sea campion, thrift, foxglove — along the cliff path. Winter for the moorland in its stripped-back, weather-honest form. Avoid summer weekends when the car park above Zennor floods with hikers.