Lizard Peninsula

There are few places in Cornwall, or for that matter in Britain, that are made up of such a singular mix of elements as the Lizard Peninsula. In its buildings and place names it is recognisably Cornish, but in its scenery, rocks and plants it is strikingly different. You intuitively recognise this as you walk the coast or cross the downs, although it's often hard to pin down exactly where this feeling of dislocation comes from. The coast is as spectacular as any in Cornwall and yet there is an extra edge to the cliffs at Black Head, The Rill and Vellan Head. Here the dark cliffs seem to suck in and trap the sunlight and one immediately senses that below the thin layer of vegetation there is an alien quality to the rocks. Similarly, in the centre of the Lizard on Goonhilly Downs you'll find an area of barren heath that has resisted all attempts at cultivation and instead is peopled with the burial mounds of the prehistoric dead.

Yet, in this troubling, looking-glass landscape there is also a visual and sensory richness that can take your breath away – the aquamarine sea; the astonishing variety of plants; the pebbles of every colour on the beaches. If you drop to your knees on the coast path or on the downs, another scale of richness is revealed – a world of miniature plants found nowhere else in Britain, like fringed rupture-wort and land quillwort. In the winter the downs at Predannack and Goonhilly are as bleak as any in Cornwall, but in the summer they vibrate to the hum of iridescent dragonflies and with the colour of a hundred flowering plants. The most conspicuous is Cornish or Goonhilly heath, a plant found almost nowhere else in Britain and whose home is really on the Atlantic coasts of France and Portugal. It's in these eye-catching contrasts that the character of the Lizard is to be found: a kaleidoscopic world of colourful plants and pebbles set against an acutely austere landscape; the primal heath of Goonhilly set against the modernity of the Earth Station. At Downas, Carleon and Kynance the Lizard possesses some of the most beautiful coves in Cornwall, but they are set against and surrounded by some of the most bleak and unforgiving coastline in Cornwall.

The explanation for these contrasts lies squarely beneath your feet, because on the Lizard peninsula Mother Nature has reluctantly given up a medley of igneous and metamorphic rocks that properly belong in the Earth's oceanic lithosphere and are only rarely found on dry land. The impact of the geology is so pronounced that you can often guess the type of rock under your feet by the landscape and vegetation in front of your eyes. Compare, for instance, the landscape of Goonhilly Downs and Kynance with that around Lizard Point or Gunwalloe. It is these unusual rocks that underpin the distinctiveness of the Lizard, their boundaries that provoke abrupt changes in vegetation and soil fertility, their colourful pebbles that catch the eye.

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