Saltash

Saltash calls itself the Gateway to Cornwall, which is a generous way of saying people mostly pass through it at forty miles an hour on their way to somewhere with a beach. It has a genuine claim to being a proper town when Plymouth was still a patch of gorse, and it has been quietly resentful about the pecking order ever since. The bridges are magnificent, the view back across the Tamar is better than the view forward, and the whole place has the settled air of somewhere that stopped trying to impress anyone around the time the ferry stopped running. Live here and you get Cornwall on the deeds and Plymouth on the weekend, which suits people who like the idea of Cornwall more than the drive.