Crackington Haven

Cream Teas Above the Beach

The Cabin Café sits above the beach, hires out wetsuits and boards, and does a highly regarded homemade cream tea. It opens seven days a week, every week of the year except Christmas Day, which for a Cornish beach café is a kind of statement. Dogs are welcome, there's plenty of outdoor seating, and in summer they run BBQ evenings. The pasties are homemade, as are the pork belly baguettes.

There are two cafés serving the beach and a general shop with toilets nearby. The Haven Café also does generous cream teas with a sea view, so the village is well covered for scones.

The Inn and the Atlantic Cove

The pub is the Coombe Barton Inn, at the head of the beach, about 300 years old. It was originally built as the house for the man who ran the local slate quarries, which tells you what the village used to be about. Glyn and Celi run the kitchen now, cooking modern Cornish and world food from locally caught fish and local meat. The menu runs to salt and pepper squid, an 8oz Warrens rump steak with chips, fish and chips with mushy or garden peas, Whitby wholetail scampi, and a braised lamb shank shepherd's pie. Sunday brings aged roast sirloin with a Yorkshire pudding, slow-roast shoulder of lamb, or confit and roast chicken breast. It ranks first of the two inns in the village, which is a small field, but the view over the beach and out to sea does most of the persuading. It serves Cornish real ales and is listed by CAMRA. There are six rooms and a self-catering lodge.

The beach itself is sand at low tide with extensive rock pools, sheltered surf that suits all abilities and stays cleaner than the neighbouring beaches. There's seasonal lifeguard cover and public toilets. The valley is deep and narrow, a coombe opening onto a small Atlantic beach hemmed by dark, dramatically folded cliffs.

Folded Rock and Hard Coastal Miles

Those cliffs are the reason geologists worldwide say "Crackington Formation" — the folded, zig-zag Carboniferous rock was first described here. The Cornish name is Porthkragen, "sandstone cove."

The walking is not gentle. The South West Coast Path south to Boscastle runs about seven miles with 1,771 feet of ascent, a relentless run of steep climbs and plunging descents, one of the most demanding stretches on the whole path. Cambeak headland rises immediately south for far-reaching views. A mile down the coast is High Cliff, at 735 feet Cornwall's highest sheer cliff, with a bench at the summit.

Hardy's Cliffhanger and the Journey In

High Cliff is where Thomas Hardy set the scene in A Pair of Blue Eyes in which a man is left dangling over the drop, face to face with a fossil "with eyes," and is saved when the heroine strips off her underclothes to make a rope. The word "cliffhanger" wasn't recorded until 1931. Hardy was courting Emma Gifford on this coast at the time; the two of them used to walk down to the isolated beach called The Strangles.

Getting here means narrow lanes off the A39 — Bude is about twenty minutes away, buses are sparse, and no railway comes anywhere near.

The Sand That Came Back

The sand here once vanished for centuries, carted off by landowners for building and soil. It came back on its own.