St Stephen

St Stephen is what happens when a village spends two hundred years digging up the ground beneath itself and then has to live on top of the result. The china clay left behind spoil tips the locals call the Cornish Alps, which is the sort of branding you arrive at only after accepting that the real Alps were never coming. It is quiet, unbothered, and entirely uninterested in whether you find it pretty. People who move here for the coast get a rude surprise about eight miles inland; people who move here for the price of a house get exactly what they came for.