Basset's Cove

What you find at the bottom changes considerably with the tide. At low water there's a reasonable stretch of fine, soft sand, with rock pools exposed among the boulders at its margins - a rewarding spot for a quiet hour of rockpooling if you've timed the visit right. As the tide comes in, the sand narrows quickly and the beach reduces to a boulder field of rock ledges and outcrops "lashed by the waves", in the words of one local walking guide, with little or no dry sand left at all by high water. Anyone planning to spend time on the beach itself, rather than just viewing it from the path, needs to check tide times carefully and allow enough margin to get back up the cliff path in good time. The cove is also, informally, known locally by the older name Spratting Cove, and has an established local reputation as a naturist beach, though this is not an official designation and isn't signed or managed as one.

Geologically, this coastline is quite different from the granite headlands further west at Land's End or the Lizard. The North Cliffs are formed of soft, gritty Devonian slate - known locally as killas - laid down long before Cornwall's granite intrusions and folded and fractured by later earth movements. It's a rock type that erodes readily under the constant battering of Atlantic swell, which is why this stretch of coast is characterised by crumbling, undercut cliff faces, detached rock stacks and pinnacles, and coves like Basset's Cove that have been carved out where the rock is weakest. The same softness that makes the scenery so dramatic is also what makes the cliff path down to the cove intrinsically loose and slippery underfoot, and why it should always be treated with some caution rather than assumed to be in the same state it was on a previous visit.

The cove's name comes from the Basset family, one of Cornwall's most prominent mining dynasties, who owned the Tehidy estate a short distance inland for around seven centuries before selling it in 1916. John Francis Basset, a 19th-century mine owner whose grand residence was Tehidy House, is generally credited as the cove's namesake. The family's mining wealth reshaped much of this coastline - it was Basset money that helped fund the development of Portreath's harbour a little to the north, built from 1760 to serve the copper and tin trade out of the Camborne-Redruth mining district, and Tehidy's grounds, now a public country park of around 250 acres run by Cornwall Council, still carry traces of that industrial history in among its woodland trails.

The wider North Cliffs stretch is valued as much for its wildlife as its geology and mining heritage. The cliff-top grassland and heathland here is managed for conservation, with grazing (Shetland ponies are used along parts of this coast) helping to keep gorse and scrub in check so that wildflowers such as sea thrift, kidney vetch and clover can establish themselves each spring and summer. Grey seals use the more inaccessible coves along this coastline to rest and breed, and are sometimes spotted from the cliff path itself, while Godrevy lighthouse is visible to the south on a clear day, marking the far end of the same run of coast towards Hayle and St Ives Bay. It's a stretch worth slowing down for rather than walking straight past on the way to somewhere else.