Summerleaze Down

The clifftop stretch of Summerleaze Down rolls out above Bude with the sort of casual drama that makes you forget you're in Cornwall for a moment - feels almost like somewhere wilder. It's a nature reserve that doesn't announce itself loudly, which is rather the point. You get proper coastal heath here, gorse and heather doing their thing on the slope, and the path keeps close enough to the edge that the sea's always in your peripheral. On a decent day the visibility stretches for miles along the coast.

Walkers will get the most from this place. It's not a destination in itself - you're looking at forty minutes to an hour if you do the main loop - but it slots perfectly into a longer clifftop ramble from Bude town itself. The terrain's manageable rather than punishing, though it can get breezy up here and the path narrows in patches. There's proper solitude on weekdays, which makes a change from the busier beaches just south.

If you're based at Wooda Farm Holiday Park, you're barely twenty minutes away, which makes it an easy half-morning's walk before heading back for lunch. Atlantic Surf Pods is marginally further but still dead convenient. Neither requires booking ahead or paying entry - it's one of those places you just arrive at and explore. Best visited outside school holidays when the coastal footpath isn't clogged with families, though it never really gets rammed. The light's best in late afternoon when the sun picks out the heath.