Charlestown Harbour

You step down onto the quay and the twentieth century falls away. Tall masts rise against the sky, rigging humming faintly in the breeze, and the stone piers curve around a harbour with not a single parked car or plastic sign to break the spell. Sailing ships lie moored where copper and clay once loaded. It is so perfectly of its own age that you half expect a camera crew around the corner, and often there is one.

This is Charlestown, and almost nothing you see here is accidental. It was built to order between seventeen ninety-one and eighteen oh-one by a local landowner named Charles Rashleigh, who gave the place his name. Before he came, this was little more than a fishing cove called West Polmear. Rashleigh, with advice from the great engineer John Smeaton, designed a proper harbour to ship out copper ore, and then, as fortunes shifted, the booming china clay dug from the pits inland. The village around it was raised at the same moment, all of a piece. Charlestown sits on the slate coast of St Austell Bay, and behind it rise the white spoil heaps of the clay country, the so-called Cornish Alps, kaolin left from granite slowly rotted to powder. Because the harbour was never modernised, its Georgian character survives complete, a registered conservation area and one of the most sought-after film locations in Britain. Rashleigh built not only for trade but for the future, and the great irony is that the very thing that once made Charlestown modern, its careful new engineering, is now what makes it feel so wonderfully old.

Here is what to look for as you walk the quays. First, the tall ships themselves, resident square-riggers moored in the basin, their masts and yards the signature sight of the place. Second, the harbour's engineering, the stone piers and the lock gates that hold the water in, a working port designed with real skill more than two centuries ago. Third, the absence of clutter. Notice how free the quays are of cars, wires and modern fittings, which is exactly why film and television crews return again and again. Fourth, the Shipwreck Treasure Museum on the quayside, which tells the story of the clay trade and of the wrecks along this coast. And fifth, lift your eyes inland toward those pale clay tips on the horizon, the Cornish Alps, and you begin to understand what all this stonework was built to carry. Down on the shore, too, watch the water and the cliffs nearby, where gulls and waders work the tideline and seals are sometimes glimpsed offshore.

That film connection is worth pausing on. Charlestown's unaltered eighteenth-century face has made it a stand-in for harbours across the ages, and it became especially well known as a location for the television series Poldark, whose story of Cornish mining and the sea found a ready-made stage in these quays. When the tall ships are in and the light is low, it takes very little imagination to see why. Directors do not have to hide the modern world here, because so little of it ever arrived. The harbour simply plays itself, an authentic Georgian port doing on camera exactly what it was made to do.

From Charlestown the Coast Path continues around St Austell Bay toward Par, following a shore that once hummed with the trade of copper and clay. Before you leave, walk out to the end of a pier and look back at the whole scene, the masts, the stone, the water held quiet behind the gates, a working harbour that time forgot to change. Take care near the quay edges and mind the tides, and if you ever need help on this coast, dial nine-nine-nine or one-one-two and ask for the Coastguard. Walk safe.