The Cornwall the guidebooks skip.

A cluster of tiny coves on the south coast between Marazion and Porthleven, named after the eighteenth-century smuggler John Carter, who called himself the King of Prussia and operated from these granite inlets for decades. The approach is along a footpath from the car park at the top of the hill — five minutes' walk, manageable for children but not for pushchairs. The coves themselves are tiny — granite rocks, pools, and narrow strips of sand at low tide — and the swimming is off the rocks into deep, clear water. The setting is extraordinary: St Michael's Mount is visible across the bay, and the light on the granite in late afternoon is the warm pink that appears on every Cornwall calendar. Prussia Cove is well known to locals but barely visited by tourists because it doesn't appear on any of the "best beaches" lists — the beaches are too small and too rocky for most people's definition. Their loss.

A village between St Ives and St Just on the B3306, the most beautiful road in Cornwall. Zennor is tiny — a church, a pub (the Tinners Arms, excellent), a small museum (the Wayside Museum, which documents life in this landscape over five thousand years), and a cluster of granite cottages. The church has a famous carved mermaid on a fifteenth-century bench end — the Mermaid of Zennor, who supposedly lured a chorister into the sea at nearby Pendour Cove. The walk from Zennor to the cove is spectacular — twenty minutes across the clifftops with views that justify every step. D.H. Lawrence lived here during the First World War and was driven out by the locals, who suspected him of being a German spy. The Gurnard's Head, a mile up the road, is one of the best gastropubs in Cornwall. Between the church, the pub, the walk, and the food, Zennor is a full afternoon — and most visitors to St Ives never discover it.

The Roseland is the peninsula between the Fal estuary and St Austell Bay, and it is the quietest corner of the Cornish coast. No famous beaches, no celebrity restaurants, no major attractions — just rolling farmland, tiny creeks, and the kind of peace that most of Cornwall has lost to tourism. St Just in Roseland has a thirteenth-century church in a subtropical churchyard that descends to the water's edge — John Betjeman called it the most beautiful churchyard in England. St Mawes is a genteel harbour village with a Henry VIII castle and a passenger ferry to Falmouth. The coast path from St Anthony Head lighthouse to Towan Beach is empty and beautiful. Portscatho is a fishing village with a good pub (the Plume of Feathers) and a small beach that doesn't appear on any top-ten lists. The Roseland rewards a day of slow driving, stopping wherever the road turns towards the water. It is the anti-Newquay — and that's precisely the recommendation.

A hamlet on the north coast between Port Isaac and Polzeath that was abandoned in the nineteenth century when the fishing failed and the men left. The story that the entire village died in a single storm is a myth — they left gradually for better prospects — but the atmosphere of the place feeds the legend. A handful of cottages (now National Trust holiday lets), a rocky inlet, and nothing else. The coast path from Port Quin to Port Isaac is three miles of some of the finest clifftop walking in Cornwall — high, exposed, and dramatic, with views across to Tintagel on a clear day. Walking in the other direction, towards Polzeath, the path passes Doyden Castle — a folly built in the 1830s as a gambling den and now a National Trust holiday cottage. Port Quin has no facilities, no pub, no shop, and no mobile signal. It is the kind of place where you sit on a rock, eat a sandwich, and listen to the sea. The simplicity is the point.