St Stephen

The church sits on a quiet lane just outside Mount Hawke, its grey stone tower rising above the surrounding countryside with proper unpretentious dignity. St Stephen is one of those Cornish parish churches that rewards the curious - medieval in its bones, with the kind of worn flagstones and carved bench ends you'd expect in a place this old.

Inside, the light falls through tall windows onto simple whitewashed walls. There's no fuss about it, which is rather the point. You'll find the usual suspects of Cornish ecclesiastical detail - a Norman font, a rood screen that's seen better centuries, the sort of altar furnishings that speak to genuinely lived faith rather than Victorian restoration zeal.

It's the sort of place that makes sense as a Sunday morning wander if you're staying nearby, rather than a destination in itself. Give yourself twenty minutes, half an hour if you're the type to read every inscription on the walls. Walkers on longer circuits through the Cornish countryside will pass it naturally enough.

If you're based at Perran View Holiday Park, just five miles away, St Stephen works as a gentle leg-stretch between the coast and the moors. The village itself offers nothing much beyond the church and a lane, but that's rather why it's still here at all - unspoilt by the sort of improvements that ruin smaller places. Free to enter, assuming the door's unlocked, which it usually is.