Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly: Local, Characterful Guides to Britain’s Special Places

Thoroughly updated and significantly expanded in this new fourth edition, Bradt’s Cornwall & The Isles of Scilly (Slow Travel) is the most well-established guide to a perennially popular British county. Offering in-depth exploration of both frequently visited and less-well-known destinations, it is written in a friendly, engaging style and includes up-to-date listings of the best (and sometimes least obvious) places to eat, drink and sleep, appealing to all budgets.
Long popular with discerning travelers and foodies, and with its fame enhanced by TV dramas such as Poldark, few English counties offer such geographical diversity as does England’s southwesternmost region. The rugged, storm-lashed north coast and wide, sandy beaches favored by surfers lie rarely more than a few miles from the sheltered creeks, coves and exotic gardens of the south. Wild moorland is dotted with Neolithic standing stones and mining heritage. And, just 28 miles from Land’s End, the Isles of Scilly offer an exhilarating blend of tropical exoticism and wild isolation.
Cornwall’s connections with the USA are many and varied, ranging from a memorial to Cornish-born Rick Rescorla, the World Trade Center’s heroic security chief who led evacuation efforts on September 11 2001, to artist James Turrell, whose Skyspace stars at Penzance’s Tremenheere garden. The Cornish mining diaspora has a strong presence in California, Pennsylvania and Michigan, while Redruth - Cornwall’s mining capital - is twinned with Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Tate St Ives art gallery celebrates abstract expressionist Mark Rothko’s 1959 visit to the town, while 7,500 members of the 29th US Infantry Division departed the beach below Trebah Gardens en route to 1944’s D-Day landings.
Cornwall rewards people who take a Slow approach to travel. Listen to world-class musicians playing in tiny rural churches. Explore Bodmin Moor’s Kerdroya, a classical labyrinth built of Cornish stone hedging. Glimpse the future of sustainable technologies at the Eden Project. Discover where oysters are still harvested traditionally and where the best Cornish ice creams, pasties and cider are made. The ideal companion for a visit, Bradt’s Cornwall & The Isles of Scilly (Slow Travel) is an invitation to imbibe the region’s rich and diverse delights.

Award-winning travel writer Kirsty Fergusson grew up in the West Country, but did not venture across the Tamar until her fifth decade, when the opportunity arose to move to a remote cottage near Land’s End in the far west of Cornwall. Having lived in Greece, Spain and France for many years, Fergusson’s knowledge of the region was unclouded by TV images or the partisan adoration, nostalgia or prejudice that remembered childhood holidays seem to inspire. So with fresh eyes, an old bicycle and an even older pair of legs, she set out to explore and write about her adopted county with the same open-minded curiosity and Slow Travel ethic that had taken her plant-hunting in Mongolia and pottering around the Latin quarter of Paris. A keen promoter of the Slow Food movement, Fergusson has twice been appointed to judge in the Food and Farming section of the Royal Cornwall Show.