Falmouth, Cornwall: Maritime History, Coastal Gardens, and the Eden Project

The National Maritime Museum Cornwall on Discovery Quay is built around a tidal gallery where small craft float on the actual estuary water; it covers Cornwall's maritime heritage from pilchard luggers to racing yachts with intelligence and visual imagination. The tower lookout above the main galleries has views over the harbour entrance and the mouth of the Carrick Roads (the estuary proper), and the collection of small working craft from around Cornwall — oyster dredgers, crabbers, ferryboats — is the most complete regional collection in Britain.

Trebah Garden, four kilometers west of Falmouth at the head of its own ravine running down to the Helford River, was planted in the 1840s and is a subtropical garden in the sense that the Gulf Stream makes subtropical planting viable this far north: tree ferns from New Zealand (12 meters high), giant gunnera, Chilean rhododendrons, and a hydrangea walk above the beach at the bottom of the ravine where American troops embarked for Utah Beach on June 1, 1944. The garden is at its best from February (camellias) through June (rhododendrons and azaleas), though the tree fern gorge is striking in any season. Glendurgan, a National Trust garden in the next valley, has a maze within a valley garden of similar character.

The Eden Project, forty-five minutes northeast of Falmouth near St. Austell, occupies a reclaimed china clay pit and contains the world's largest indoor rainforest — the biomes are geodesic domes that cover a Mediterranean climate zone and a humid tropical zone, both planted with extraordinary density. The outdoor gardens cover the remainder of the pit and the surrounding slopes with plants by region of origin. The scale is genuinely impressive and the educational content is consistently good; the project's focus on climate, food systems, and sustainability is earnest and backed by real substance. It is crowded in summer; early morning arrival is advisable.

The Lizard Peninsula, the southernmost point of mainland Britain, begins fifteen kilometers southwest of Falmouth. The Lizard Point car park is a short walk from the cliff edge above the most southerly tip; the serpentinite rock that names the peninsula and gives the cliffs their distinctive green-brown coloring is visible in the cliff faces and sold polished at the local craft shops. Kynance Cove, three kilometers north of Lizard Point, is an often-photographed beach set inside serpentinite sea stacks and accessible by a short steep path; at low tide the sands between the stacks are walkable. The coast path in both directions from Lizard Point passes through National Trust-owned heath with nesting choughs (red-billed crows, returned to Cornwall in 2001 after a long absence).

Falmouth's waterfront has Cornish pasties (the genuine article, crimped on the side not the top as the tourist versions are, using proper skirt steak rather than mince), local crab sandwiches, and a growing number of independent coffee shops and seafood restaurants that reflect the town's transformation from working-class harbour town to destination. The weekly Falmouth Farmer's Market on Tuesdays sells Cornish cheese, honey, and market garden produce.