Stanbury Mouth

There is no lifeguard cover at Stanbury Mouth, and none is likely given how remote and lightly used it is - anyone visiting should treat it as an unsupervised beach and plan accordingly. The sea here can be genuinely hazardous: currents run close to the rocks at either end of the cove, and low or turning tide is generally considered the riskiest time to be in the water. Swimming is not recommended, and surfers or bodyboarders who do use it should already know the break and its hazards well. The beach is also tide-dependent in a more basic sense - much of the sand disappears as the tide comes in, leaving mostly rock and a narrow strip of shingle, so it is worth checking tide times before setting off on the walk down, and not lingering once the tide turns.

Geologically, Stanbury Mouth sits within the same Bude Formation that shapes so much of this coastline - a sequence of Upper Carboniferous shales, mudstones, siltstones and sandstones, folded and contorted over millions of years into the tight zig-zag patterns visible in the cliff faces from Bude north to the Devon border. It is part of a wider stretch of coast recognised as a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its geology, and the cliffs around Stanbury Mouth show the same dramatic banding and folding that draws geologists to better-known outcrops nearby at Millook and Duckpool. The rock underfoot on the beach itself is a mix of this shale and sandstone, worn into ledges and boulders rather than the smoother granite reefs found further south and west in Cornwall - a reminder that this stretch of coast has a very different geological story to the county's more famous surf beaches.

The farmland immediately inland, around Stowe Barton, has a surprisingly grand history. It was once the site of Stowe House, a substantial brick mansion built in the 1670s for John Grenville, 1st Earl of Bath, from the same Grenville family that produced Sir Richard Grenville of Revenge fame and the Civil War commander Sir Bevil Grenville. Stowe House was said to rival the finest houses in the West Country, with its own chapel, a real tennis court and formal gardens, but it fell into disrepair after the earldom died out and was largely demolished in 1739 - some of its fittings reportedly turned up afterwards in other West Country buildings. Today Stowe Barton is National Trust farmland, part of a large holding of coastal fields and a little woodland managed alongside the Trust's other land between Sandymouth and Duckpool, and the Trust has been reviewing how the farm is managed in recent years as part of a wider push to improve the land for wildlife along this coast. Little of that grandeur is visible from the beach itself, but it is a reminder that this quiet stretch of coast has a much longer story than its emptiness today suggests.

Despite - or perhaps because of - how few people visit, Stanbury Mouth and the cliffs around it are a good spot for wildlife. Seals are occasionally seen offshore or hauled out on the rocks, and the clifftop slopes above the beach support breeding linnets, blackcaps and stonechats in season. In late spring and summer the coast path here is edged with wildflowers typical of this exposed, salt-blown grassland - wild thyme, milkwort, thrift and yellow iris among them - and green hairstreak butterflies can be spotted along the same stretch. Rockpools among the boulders at the beach's fringes are worth a look at low tide, though they are smaller and less abundant than at some of the more sheltered coves further along the coast. As with anywhere this undisturbed, it rewards a slow, quiet approach rather than rushing straight down to the sand.