St Agnes, Cornwall

St Agnes spent four centuries trying to build a harbour and the Atlantic knocked every attempt flat, which tells you roughly how negotiations go around here. The village sits on a hillside so steep the cottages appear to be queuing to fall into the sea, above a coast where a hundred mines once employed a thousand men and now employ a gift shop. What's left is a place that got beautiful by accident, industrial ruin recast as clifftop walking, and the people who came for the view still talk about the tin like they dug it themselves. Nobody here needs telling it's lovely, and nobody here will let you forget the price of that.