Tywardreath

Tywardreath is a hilltop village whose Cornish name means house on the beach, which tells you everything about how the last thousand years have gone here: the sea left, the mud arrived, the estuary silted up into a view. What is left is a church, a slope, some very old cottages and a short walk down to Par Sands, where the beach is genuinely lovely and the china clay works behind it are genuinely not. Daphne du Maurier lived up the road and wrote a novel about a man taking a drug that let him see the medieval version of this place, which is either the finest literary compliment a village has ever received or the most elaborate way anyone has ever said the present day was a bit quiet.