2 to 3 days in Cornwall

Travel to and within Cornwall is relatively slow. It's not a one-hub sort of place, but of course on a short trip you shouldn't expect to see Cornwall from stem to stern, anyway.

Do you plan to drive or use public transportation? If you'll have a rental car, look at estimated driving times on ViaMichelin.com. If you plan to depend on trains, check nationalrail.co.uk . Rail service within Cornwall is relatively limited, so if you won't have a car you'll probably need to use some buses.

I think you may find that even three days isn't really long enough for a satisfying trip to Cornwall if you're starting from London. It will probably take the better part of a day to get there and the same to return.

When I (car-less) visited Cornwall in 2017, I stayed in Mevagissey and St. Ives. With a car (whether driven from London or rented locally) you would have a lot more options.

The rail fare from London to Cornwall is likely to be very costly if you don't buy tickets early enough to snag an Advance ticket. It's also important to make lodging reservations well in advance, and I found it difficult to find a restaurant that wasn't fully booked at dinner time. (Mine was a summer trip.) It seems that the combination of Doc Martin and Poldark has really ramped up the number of visitors to Cornwall, and the availability of hotel rooms and restaurant tables hasn't caught up.

Thank you for your kind response! We are trying to plan travel prior to the weekend ( 22-24) and the local Holiday week, heading back to London when everyone else is leaving for vacation :) We are planning on driving to stay flexible and see more during the drive. We know it will be whirlwind, but we are used to that and hopefully we can discover places we can return to for a longer visit! We are know for being in London during busy times, not by design, but because of our own vacation schedules and our daughters time off from school. We were in London, but left the day before William and Kate's Wedding and the same for Prince Williams birth, too funny! I am torn between lodging on the North/West coast or the South/East coast pf Cornwall, but I will need to get something lined up soon because availability with start to become limited. Hopefully I will get some more feedback and then make some decisions!

We were in Cornwall in 2007 with a walking tour group. It's a great place to walk if you have the time. We flew from London-Gatwick to Newquay, then a taxi to St. Agnes. St. Agnes or Truro might work as a hub for you, but we didn't do any driving ourselves to know for sure. We enjoyed St. Ives, the Lizard Peninsula (be sure to pick up some Ann's Pasties on the way, there's a website) and Cadgwith. There's a small Tate Museum in St. Ives. Cornwall is beautiful and you will want to return.

We love Cornwall! We first went in 2016 (a long weekend in August) and loved it so much we went back for a week in August 2017. Then in November 2017 we were staying in Dartmoor and it turned out to be an easy (<1 hr) drive to Port Isaac, Doc Martin's beautiful village. It's good you are driving – you will have much more flexibility, as you say.

I didn't see which month you are going, but summer, while a lovely season there, can be crowded – not just with Poldark and Doc Martin fans, as mentioned above, but also loads of Germans, who come b/c of a popular German TV series based on the novels of Rosamunde Pilcher. Yes, all pubs and restaurants seemed to be booked solid for dinner every evening, but we don't like crowded places anyway, so we just had a wonderful pub lunch most days and ate a relaxing meal at home in the evenings, which was better for our schedule anyway – we did a lot of hikes/walks, and couldn't be sure of when we'd be back in civilization anyway!

Others can perhaps recommend a "hub"; I do think you can't go wrong wherever you go. I can tell you where we went; every place was amazingly beautiful and we want to go back (and live there, haha!). And see more of Cornwall (and Devon!). We made a list of places we'd like to see by watching Tony Robinson's Walk through Cornwall and looking at books of walks. Our list included St Just in Roseland, the Lost Gardens of Heligan (neither of which we made it to – Cornwall/Devon is a large-ish area and driving can be slow on small roads, and at weekends), St Michael's Mount (which we fell in love with, and visited the island several times, both walking and taking a boat), the Lizard Peninsula (b/c my husband is a Daniel Silva fan), and a tin mine.

Where we ended up was dependent on finding accommodations (our first trip was tied to a business trip in London so we didn't have much time to prepare); we knew we wanted to rent a flat, not stay in a hotel. (We did, however, break up the drive by staying in a beautiful, historic hotel halfway there, in Dartmoor – the Oxenham Arms. We even went back a few months later.) Our first visit we stayed in Praa Sands, near St Michael's Mount, and our second visit we stayed in Marazion, also near St Michael's Mount (and Penzance, Mousehole, etc.).

It depends what you want to do, but we wanted to take walks, explore old churches, coves, tin mines, and standing stones. We did many fantastic walks on the Lizard that included old churches (w/the list of vicars going back to the 1200s), ruined mines (watch out for pits in the ground), standing stones (we had Lanyon Quoit and Mên-an-Tol, among others, all to ourselves! in August!), secluded beaches, the Marconi Centre and his wireless stations, the RNLI Lizard lifeboat station, walked to beautiful places like Cadgwith Cove (where we saw the day's catch being brought in and had yummy ice cream), & followed in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, etc., etc.

So we winnowed down the overwhelming amount of choices based on which hikes we wanted to do (mostly Lizard peninsula; some on the other side, I think called Penwith peninsula) and where we could find accommodations where we were excited to stay. Our flat in Marazion was in a very old cottage and it had a view of St Michael's Mount. Enjoy your trip!!