Freathy Beach

Freathy sits along the central run of Whitsand Bay on the Rame Peninsula, the little-visited south-eastern corner of Cornwall sometimes called the county's forgotten corner. The land falls away sharply here, and the beach below is reached on foot down steep, sometimes rough paths from the road that runs along the cliff top. It is a wild, exposed stretch of Atlantic sand and rock, with the open sea on one side and the green slopes of the peninsula rising behind.

What sets Freathy apart is the extraordinary scatter of timber chalets and shacks terraced into the cliff face above the beach. They began appearing in the early twentieth century, an unplanned, organic settlement that grew hut by hut, and many have been passed down through the same families for generations. Painted in all manner of colours and perched at all manner of angles, they give this part of the bay a quirky, homespun character you will not find anywhere else along the coast.