🌊 The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall: Britain’s Wildest & Most Southerly Headland

✨ Cornwall’s Most Extraordinary Landscape

Mullion Cove on the Lizard Peninsula,

The Lizard is the big granddaddy of all our West Country headlands – one vast cape stretching a dozen miles south from what could be regarded as the Cornish mainland into an azure oceanic world, and this journey southwards allows it to have a unique environment all of its own.

It is a headland of headlands, a cape of immense variety, a windswept netherworld of surprise and delight. The Lizard contains some of the West Country’s best beaches and coves and also some of its bleakest landscapes. It boasts deep woods and hidden demesnes; it has a helicopter graveyard, a massive airfield and even an Earth Station equipped with massive dishes you can see for miles.

If you wanted to go somewhere very, very different but not leave the region, then the Lizard would be the place for you. I can never go there without thinking I’ve travelled to another country. It is more Brittany than Britain – you somehow feel that you ought to be handing over a visa or passport as you drive past the big security fence of RNAS Culdrose.

Fishing boats at Cadgwith cove

🌍 Britain’s Most Southerly Point

The Lizard is the closest you can get in the UK to the equator without getting your feet wet which, needless to say, makes it one of the warmest places in Britain. It is also made of weird and wonderful rocks you’ll be hard pushed to find anywhere else. Both these facts help make this remarkable peninsula to be quite different from anywhere else in these isles.

Let’s start at that tip nearest the winter sun - you can be in no doubt as to where you are, simply because there’s a large sign declaring: “Most Southerly Point”.

👉 Learn more: https://www.visitcornwall.com/places/the-lizard

Lizard Point with its old lifeboat station

⚓ Shipwreck Coast & Lifeboat History

Ships need all the warning they can get when it comes to Lizard. The great southerly pointing cape is just about as hazardous a place as you can find anywhere around our shores. Which is why the RNLI built a lifeboat house in Polpeor Cove.

Polpeor is set between the twin jaws of Lizard Head and Lizard Point, and has its very own treacherous reef called Vellan Drang just offshore. On a wild day it would be difficult to imagine a more dangerous place to launch a boat.

Yet lifeboats went on missions from this hazardous place for over 100 years, and countless lives were saved. However, in 1961 the RNLI saw the error of its ways and sensibly relocated the local boat in the lee of Bass Point around the corner.

👉 RNLI station info: https://rnli.org/find-my-nearest/lifeboat-stations/lizard-lifeboat-station

🗺️ Lizard Point: Geography & Folklore

Looking at a map, by the way, you could get slightly confused as to which point is actually the most southerly. The OS Explorer 103 has the headland a mile to the west as Lizard Point, but the National Trust booklet (the organisation owns much of the land around here) says that is more properly called Old Lizard Head, while the one just below the car park is Lizard Point proper.

As this seems to be the headland commonly acknowledged as Britain's most southerly point, we will bow to the trust's superior knowledge.

The trust leaflet also explains the story that lies behind nearby strangely named Pistol Meadow, situated between the two points. Nothing to do with firearms - the name comes from the Cornish 'pystyll' meaning waterfall. Some 200 bodies are buried there and you can still make out low mounds of graves inland from the grove of tamarisk trees.

In 1720 a troop ship called the Royal Anne ploughed into the rocks of the bay - you only have to look at the reefs to know that few survived. No Christian burial, just a mass grave. Some say you can still hear the cries of lost souls on a stormy night, or is it only the distant clanging of the shipping buoy?

👉 Visitor info: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/cornwall/lizard-point

Southern tip of England

🌿 Rare Wildlife & Unique Geology

As iconoclastic places go, Lizard is pretty special. Not only is it the nation’s most southerly tip, the peninsula is also internationally important for plant and insect life. Rare sedges and tiny liverworts grow in the pools and puddles and the maritime heathlands are rich in interesting insects such as moths and spiders. The heather is a rare type known as erica vagans found nowhere else in Britain.

👉 Chough conservation: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/chough

Choughs in a field right down at The Lizard

🌱 Conservation & Changing Landscapes

It was down at Britain’s most southerly car park the other day that I met Rachel Holder who is the National Trust’s warden for the immediate area. The trust owns a lot of land around here, which is a good thing because of all those rare plants. But Rachel was working on something far more prosaic last week.

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👉 About the National Trust: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/cornwall

🐦 The Return of the Chough

Many folk are attracted to the point in springtime because they’ve heard about Cornwall’s extremely rare “national” bird. Cynics might believe it was a set-up job put in place by the regional tourist board, but the county’s long lost national emblem really has elected to make its home at the very tip of the Lizard close to the place where throngs of tourists come and go.

The choughs are wild birds, not released examples, as is sometimes suggested. No one knows where they came from, though some experts suggest they crossed the Channel from France, which might have some anti-European Cornish diehards choking on their pasties.

🚁 Predannack Downs & The Helicopter Graveyard

Away from the chough loving crowds here are an awful lot of other places around the peninsula that see very few visitors indeed. One such place is the remarkable helicopter graveyard at Predannack Downs. No longer accesssible to the public, alas, you used to be abe to stroll through these rotting machines.

👉 Aviation heritage: https://www.cornwallaviationheritagecentre.co.uk/

🌅 Cadgwith: Cornwall’s Most Beautiful Fishing Village

One of my favourite places on the Lizard is Cadgwith - one of the brightest jewels in Cornwall. Not so much a harbour, more an indentation in the rocks - but what a wonderful indentation it is, enjoying a greater dalliance with the sun than any other place in the kingdom.

👉 Explore Cadgwith: https://www.visitcornwall.com/places/cadgwith

🏝️ Kynance Cove: Cornwall’s Crown Jewel

It certainly is, which is probably what brings some quarter of a million visitors a year to the actual tip of the peninsula and to the nearby tourist honey-trap, outrageously beautiful Kynance Cove.

👉 Visitor guide: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/cornwall/kynance-cove

Kynance Cove on a misty afternoon

🥾 Walking the Lizard Peninsula

Perhaps we’ll have a go at that one day, but in the meantime you can read my account of the fabulous walk that’s to be enjoyed around Black Head, the mighty headland that guards the eastern flanks of the cape.

👉 Maps & routes: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/

Kikers between Lizard Point and Kynance Cove

Serpentine Rock

Serpentine was named in the 16^th century by geologists who thought its dappled colourings resembled snake’s skin. 

The 20 square mile outcrop of the attractive rock which is centred at the end of the Lizard is unique in the UK. Originally formed deep in the Earth’s crust it has, over millions of years, been subjected to enormous pressures and high temperatures and the resultant differences in mineral content produce a rich, multicoloured veining. 

For the best part of 200 years local craftsmen have been quarrying and working the stone, and their small huts and workshops can still be seen at the end of the peninsula today. 

Nowadays only a few people are licensed to extract extremely limited amounts of the rock. It was not always so – in the mid-1800s there was quite an industry at work quarrying and working serpentine, and by 1883 20 men and three boys were being employed by the Poltesco Marble Company.

Cheap marble imports, the Lizard’s remoteness and the serpentine’s weakness to deteriorate quickly in polluted exterior situations all helped to secure the industry’s demise. 

But the local families worked on and still produce all manner of gifts fashioned out of serpentine today - perhaps best known are the neatly turned lighthouses that by now must adorn a million mantelpieces around the world.

National Trust on The Lizard

The National Trust owns several separate coastal properties around the Lizard, which is a good thing as the organisation is determined to preserve this most unique and unusual environment. 

On the eastern seaboard there’s a smallish chunk at Lowland Point near St Keverne, Chynhallis Point next to Coverack, then a larger section stretching around Black Head and Dinas Cove. Further south there’s a glorious section from Polbream Point to Cadgwith, and immediately the other side of the village another property includes the famous Devil’s Frying Pan and continues, with one small gap, down to Church Cove under Landewednack.

Travelling down the west coast the trust has land stretching from the estate at Loe Pool, down past Gunwalloe Fishing Cove to Halzephron Cliff, and includes the other Church Cove and Poldhu Cove. Then there’s Angrouse Cliff with its Marconi Monument and a couple of smallish sections just north and south of Mullion Cove. Further south we come to a larger plot at Predannack, which includes the old World War II airfield, and then there’s the well-known jewel in the Lizard’s crown – Kynance Cove.

Coast path at Kennack Sands