Bedruthan, Cornwall - The Devil’s Steps

The nearest train station is Newquay 8km/5miles away; www.nationalrail.co.uk or call Traveline 30871 200 2233 for details.

Western Greyhound bus 556 runs more or less hourly between Newquay and Padstow, via the coast road just inland from our route, stopping at Mawgan Porth, Bedruthan Steps, Porthcothan, Constantine Bay and Harlyn Bay bridge.  For current timetable information call 301637 871871 or www.westerngreyhound.com. 

After decades the doldrums, the north coast of Cornwall is very much in vogue again. Newquay has had a sexy makeover, with Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver putting its seafood on Britain’s gastronomic map.  And the bucket-and-spade brigade have returned in appreciative droves. All the more reason to avoid the place like the plague you might be thinking. On the contrary: in spite of the recent tourist boom, long stretches of this exceptionally beautiful coast remain wild and unspoilt – even at the height of summer – and present a mouth-watering prospect for walkers.

It has the weather to thank for that. Jutting its jaw defiantly into the Atlantic, north Cornwall faces the full might of the ocean, and for much of the year the gales howl in with umbrella-defying ferocity, blowing mountainous waves against the slate cliffs, and twisting any exposed blackthorn trees into improbable angles.  What little vegetation there is tends to be stunted by the salt winds. Wiry herbs and Jurassic-looking mosses spring in clumps from the cracks in herringboned stone hedges, while thrift and Alexanders spill from the shelter of gorse bushes.

This is an austere, storm-scoured landscape, synonymous with shipwrecks and smugglers, which can seem unremittingly bleak one minute, and dazzingly vibrant the next. Catch the right day on any stretch of the coast between Newquay and Padstow and you’ll be startled by the translucent blue-green colour of the sea and brilliance of the sand – not to mention the breathtaking views. Our route includes a Cornish classic: the clifftop vista over Bedruthan Steps, where a rank of colossal, pointed stacks march out of the breakers against a dramatic backdrop of slate escarpments.

Meandering past a succession of picture-postcard coves, windswept headlands and old-fashioned holiday resorts, this stretch of the coast path running north of Bedruthan ranks among the prettiest in the southwest.  Moreover, it’s backed up by an unusually good bus service. Should the weather close in, or if you decide to cut the route short and kick back on one of the beaches, rest assured that the local bus company, Western Greyhound, will soon be on hand to whisk you back to where you started.

[1] Walk north along Mawgan Porth beach until you see the South West Coast Path sign at the limit of the dunes, pointing right up a path that winds towards the cliff tops. 

(A) Mawgan Porth has been settled at least as far back the Late Saxon Period comprising.  Excavations have revealed three groups of buildings ('courtyard houses') and a burial ground dating from around 850-1050. 

A breezy 20-minute walk above Trerathick Point and Cove and brings you to our featured viewpoint of the day, overlooking Bedruthan Steps and Carnewas Bay. The National Trust visitor centre and café stand one field back from the cliff edge. A paved path runs from there down to the start of the steps leading to the beach, which is covered at high tide.

(B) Bedruthan Steps and Carnewas Bay. In Victorian times it was said that the name Bedruthan Steps was taken from a mythological giant called 'Bedruthan' who used the rocks (stacks) on the beach as stepping stones.  Brown haematite used to be mined to the south of the bay. The National Trust shop was originally the count house (office) of Carnewas Mine and the cafe one of the mine buildings. 

[2] A classic view of the famous rocks extends from the north end of the bay, as the path winds beyond ancient herringbone walls to a headland dotted with Bronze Age tumuli. The next stretch skirts a series of craggy, wild coves before descending on the inlet of Porth Mear. From there the path climbs again to the cliff tops, past a spectacular blowhole, before rounding the headland to approach Porthcothan. The bus stop is opposite the village shop, on the main road, a minute’s walk inland from the beach.

(C) Porthcothan beach is popular with tourists and surfers and is patrolled by lifeguards during the day in the summer; DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda stayed in one of the holiday cottages overlooking the narrow bay for a while in the late 1930s.  

[3] To pick up the coast path again, you can either ford the stream at the top of Porthcothan beach, or else head through the dunes to the road and cross the stream via the bridge. The path turns right (north) off the track running from the bridge back to the sands. Only the odd drystone wall and a single campsite interrupt the South West Coast Path's winding progress north from Porthcothan, as it bends around a succession of rocky promontories, finally descending to sea level again at Treyarnon Bay, one of Cornwall’s loveliest little beach resorts.

(D) Treyarnon Bay is renown for its “natural” swimming pool.  At the bottom of the low cliffs near the Youth Hostel, a hollow in the rocks has been dammed at one end which is flushed out by the incoming tide and is easily accessible at low tide. 

[4] Cross to the far side of the beach and follow the lane past Treyarnon YHA, beyond which the path hugs the shoreline faithfully as it crosses north to the bottom end of Constantine Bay.

(E) Constantine Bay is named after Saint Constantine, a 6th century Cornish saint.  St Constantine's Well, an historic site, is accessible by public right of way on Trevose Golf Club's golf course.  The Constantine Bay SSSI is designated for both its biological and geological interests but the dune system is in decline because of the invasion by species such as bramble, ivy and sea buckthorn; and by visitor pressure causing erosion. 

[5] If you’re catching the bus here at Constantine rather than carrying to Harlyn, turn right just before reaching the sand and follow the lane east past a small car park, then on through the village to the shop at the crossroads. The bus stop stands on the opposite side of the road from the stores. Otherwise, walk towards the rocks at the far north end of the beach, where the coast path skirts a golf course and continues on around windswept Trevose Head, passing the lighthouse en route. 

(F) Trevose Head lighthouse was opened in 1847, powered by an oil lamp.  In 1913 a fog horn was added.  This was an enormous trumpet 36 feet long with an aperture of 18 feet by 2 feet.  Over the years the equipment has been modernised and eventually was automated in 1995.  The lighthouse is now for monitored and controlled from the Trinity House Operations and Planning Centre at Harwich in Essex.

Views extend far up the north Cornish coastline as you drop down to Mother Ivey’s Cove along the edge of a long, straight field border, with the Padstow Lifeboat Station off to your left. Skirting Rick Stein’s glamorous Art Deco house, the path then descends to Mother Ivey’s Bay, past a couple of pretty holiday cottages and a rather less attractive static caravan park.

(G) Mother Ivey's Bay takes its name from the legend of Mother Ivy who was a local wise woman. Overlooking the bay is Padstow’s lifeboat station which ranks among the busiest in the country.  On the southeast flank of Trevose Head overlooking Mother Ivey’s Bay, are many memorials to volunteers who have perished at sea over the years.  

One last headland – Cataclews Point – has to be rounded before the day’s work is done. As you bend south, you walk right past the Cellars house, the Hellyar family’s former herring factory. It stands on ground separating two exquisite coves: Big Guns and Onjohn Cove. 

(H) In 1865 two wafer-thin crescents of gold known as lunulae from the early Bronze Age were found by a labourer above Onjohn Cove to the north of Harlyn Bay. 

[6] Keep to the edge of Harlyn Bay to reach the Harlyn village. The bus stop for the return journey to Morgan Porth and Newquay, or east to Padstow, is next to the bridge at the far southeast side of the beach. 

People have defied the elements to scrape a living from this coast for more than 3000 years. During the Bronze Age (1300–700BC) a sizeable farming community of between thirty and fifty homesteads survived in wood and stone huts just inland, trading Bodmin tin and lead ore as far afield as Brittany and the west Ireland. You can see their burial mounds on the cliff tops at Park Head and Harlyn Bay, the remains of a late Iron Age fort at Redcliffe Castle (overlooking Bedruthan Steps). For most of its history, however, this area and its Celtic inhabitants existed on the margins of the known world, beyond the reach of Britain’s conquerors. Only with the rise of tin-mining and the big pilchard boom of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did it experience anything resembling prosperity – and little of this trickled down to the peasantry. 

The sheltered, sandy coves were perfect for smuggling though, and the locals were not averse to a spot of “wrecking” to supplement their meagre fishing incomes.  Dozens of ships met grisly ends on the rocks between Mawgan Porth and Trevose Head.  When the Samaritan ran aground here in 1846, the good folk of Mawgan Porth reportedly acquired a sudden penchant for fine silk clothes and cognac.

Bedruthan Steps, or Carnewas Bay as it’s also known, takes its name from the stairs hacked down to the three tidal beaches lining the cliffs by freetraders in the eighteenth century – not, as local guides would enjoy telling Victorian visitors, because the Devil once used the three pointed stacks in the bay as giant stepping stones. At low tide you can clamber down to the beach, but don’t be tempted to venture into the surf: the rip currents have claimed several lives over the years – hence the closure of the site in the winter.

Visible inland from the National Trust’s low-roofed café at Carnewas are the transmitter masts of RAF St Eval, where an ancient village was requisitioned in 1938 and all but demolished to make way for a World War II radio and air base. Marooned amid the disused runways, a lone-standing thirteenth-century Norman church is virtually all that survives of the former settlement of Trevisker, where archaeological excavations have yielded traces of settlement dating back more than 3300 years.

You pass several prominent burial mounds on the coast path winding north from Carnewas, along a fabulously convoluted, rocky line of cliffs that delves suddenly inland at Porthcothan. DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda stayed in one of the holiday cottages overlooking the narrow bay for a while in the late 1930s – before being forced out by wartime paranoia (Frieda was German, and the couple were unfairly suspected of signalling to U-boats from the cliff tops). Though small by Cornish standards, the white sand beach is a real gem.

Treyarnon Bay, the next beach north, is a slightly larger version of Porthcothan, with a youth hostel and well developed surf scene – the latter thanks to its proximity to neighbouring Constantine Bay, the most spectacular sweep of white sand and breakers on this part of the north Cornish coast. Margaret Thatcher and family used to take one of the many holiday homes nestled in the lanes behind it. Dennis would doubtless have enjoyed a round or two at golf links, whose manicured fairways you skirt en route towards the bony shoulder of Trevose Head, a bare dollop of fractured shale crowned by a solitary white lighthouse to the north. Built in the mid-nineteenth century after the wreck of the Samaritan, the light, powered by a 35- watt bulb that’s visible some twenty miles out to sea, was automated only in 1995. The neatly painted lighthouse keepers’ cottages below it have now been converted by owners, Trinity House, into holiday cottages.

Don’t be tempted to cut across the neck of Trevose Head or you’ll miss the extraordinary geological feature (marked as “Round Hole” on OS maps) on its western fringe, where the sea has worn away the slate beneath the cliff top and caused a large patch of ground to collapse thirty or more metres inland. The chasm has no fence around it, allowing you to peer over the edge to listen to the sound of waves emanating incongruously from its depths.

Descending Trevose Head, fabulous views open up to the north and south, embracing a huge expanse of coast stretching all the way from Hartland to St Ives. From this lofty vantage point, it’s easy to appreciate why the shoreline of north Cornwall has always struck fear into the heart of sailors heading up the Bristol Channel. The infamous westerlies still claim lives each year, and Padstow’s lifeboat station ranks among the busiest in the country. Its new £5.5million boathouse, on the southeast flank of Trevose Head overlooking Mother Ivey’s Bay, holds memorials to volunteers who have perished in these treacherous seas over the years.  RNLI Padstow’s darkest day was April 1900, when eight crew members drowned after their lifeboat overturned while trying to rescue the trawler Peace and Plenty, which had got into difficulties in a big storm off Trevose Head. Three of the fishing boat’s crew also died in the disaster. 

A stone’s throw below the new lifeboat station, on a bluff overlooking Mother Ivey’s Bay (aka Polverton Bay), the coast path passes the elegant white beach house of TV chef and local restaurateur, Rick Stein.  The celebrity’s Art Deco bolthole, originally built by his father and uncle in the 1930s, enjoys a sea view to die for, only slightly marred by the cliff top caravan park.

Harlyn Bay, a ten-minute walk around Cataclews Point from Mother Ivey’s, holds still more dazzling turquoise water.  It’s tempting to speculate that the same gorgeous colours enjoyed by people here today were the reason ancient inhabitants of this coast buried their dead overlooking the bay. Some 130 Iron Age graves were exhumed in the fields behind the beach by archaeologists in 1900, many of them containing metal implements and pottery.  Harlyn’s most valuable treasure, however, came to light half a century earlier, when a local labourer digging on the cliff top above Onjohn Cove (an especially beautiful spot at the northwest corner of the bay) found a pair of exquisite, wafer-thin gold neck ornaments. Known to archaeologists as “lunulae”, the necklaces were fashioned in the form of crescent moons and are thought, because of their delicacy and fine ornamentation, to have been objects of great ritual significance. Identical lunulae were discovered in Ireland, where they’re believed to have originated around 2300–2000 BC. The Harlyn necklaces are now the prize exhibits of the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro.

A cursed field

A field behind Harlyn Bay has for centuries had been associated with a sinister curse which, according to local belief, has claimed several lives. The story dates back to the sixteenth century, when the landowners, the Hellyars, ran a lucrative fish export business shipping salted Cornish pilchards to Italy. A Latin inscription carved above the door of their processing house (which still looms over the north end of the bay) recalls the fortune the trade earned for the family. Lucri Dulsis Odor, “Sweet is the Scent of Riches”, proclaimed the line etched across the lintel. But for the impoverished fisher families in the village, the declaration was replete with irony.

Resentment came to a head when a cargo of pilchards was once returned to Harlyn. Hungry families from miles around flocked to the harbour in the hope of a handout. But instead, the squire gave orders for the rotting fish to be ploughed into one of his fields as fertilizer.  Incensed by this act of stone heartedness, a local white witch, Mother Ivey, cast a curse on the pasture, saying that if ever its soil was broken, death would follow. 

The Hellyars ignored her, but would come to regret their scepticism when, within weeks, the family’s eldest son died after being thrown from his horse. In World War II, a member of the local Home Guard dropped dead soon after digging defensive trenches into the cursed field, and in the 1970s, a metal detector enthusiast met an untimely end there.

Recent experience suggests the malevolent spell has lost none of its potency. Despite Southwest Water’s hiring of a vicar to exorcise the field before laying a pipe through it a few years back, the project’s foreman died of a heart attack before the job was finished. The grass has not been disturbed since.

Terrain: Mostly level cliff tops and sandy beaches, via well worn, waymarked footpaths.  In spring - abundant coastal flora.  In summer may meet heavy congestion on the beaches and coast road.

Maps: OS Explorer 106

Visitor Information: Newquay Tourist Information Centre (tel 301637 854020 or www.newquay.co.uk)
National Trust Bedruthan Steps (tel  301637 860563 or www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-carnewasandbedruthansteps).
South West Coast Path Info (www.swcp.org.uk).
Background on the area (www.cornwall-online.co.uk).
Photos and history of the Harlyn Bay lunulae and other treasures unearthed locally. (www.meynmamvro.co.uk/article2.htm).

Eating & Drinking: various pubs, cafes and shops along the route.

Sleeping: various hotels, B&B, camping and youth hostel along the route

This route originally appeared as route number 18 in Walk Britain - Great Views in 2009 and was checked at that time by Camel Ramblers.