Plymouth Or Truro?

Plymouth is closer to London, so the train trip will be somewhat shorter (at a glance, it looked like about 3 hr. 15 min. vs. 4 hr.). I've never been to Plymouth; I liked Truro. Plymouth is on the coast; Truro is not.

Plymouth is a big ugly modern city with a small historic docks area and some far-reaching sea views. Truro is a pleasant small city that’s not in the coast.

Neither is an obvious place to stay for a holiday-maker.

If coming by train, they’re both on the direct line from London Paddington. One change at Truro would take you to the popular attractive coastal town of Falmouth, which might be an option.

Is your guide picking you up on a daily basis or just for one tour? It would help to know more about your travel plans - what are you hoping to see? Will you be returning to this base every night? Devon & Cornwall cover a huge area.

Falmouth - and many other seaside towns - are usually not in central positions. Truro is very central for Cornwall and is on the main rail line. Establish where your guide is based and where he/she is planning to take you.

In Truro, we stayed at what is now, Merchant House Hotel. We had a great dinner at an Indian restaurant in town, but didn’t get to walk around very much. In Plymouth, we just walked down by the hotel the pilgrims stayed at, looked at a couple things, then left since we were running out of time and needed to get to Windsor.

Thanks for the help. We plan to use Plymouth or Truro as a base. Our guide will pick us up for our bespoke (love that word) tour. We will spend 2 days in the area and have time to decide on places to see. Would appreciate thoughts on sites not to miss in Cornwall/Devon.

I enjoyed a terrific 6 night Road Scholar tour to Cornwall in 2017. One of the things I enjoyed most was seeing the small harbor towns as well as the neolithic sights.

I particularly liked St Mawes (across the harbor from Falmouth where the group stayed), Mevagissey, Charlestown (interesting small museum there), Fowey, Boscastle to name a few. On that trip we also stopped at The Lost Gardens of Heligan and did the China Clay works tour near there. We went to a tin mine (Geevor) but I really enjoyed the Chysauster Ancient Village in that end of the country. We stopped at Jamaica Inn (Daphne DuMaurier) and that was definitely overblown as an association to her. Not worth it in my view. We also saw the Hurlers stones but it was rainy and we did not walk up to the Cheesewring which is another nearby site.

I also stayed in Cornwall on the Rick Steves tour. We stayed in Penzance which I did not like as well as Falmouth (I realize you are not asking for locations). We did the another set of gardens (Lanhydrock) but I liked Heligan better. I was not overwhelmed by Saint Ives altho I think many do enjoy it. It was a school holiday weekend and just too crowded for me. Ditto Port Isaac. I loved the day we toured Dorset National Park - wow, what a beautiful area. We also saw some neolithic standing alignments there which were very interesting.

You can probably run yourself ragged trying to cover everything so I might just do a loop south from Truro one day and a loop North.

Just a few locations that I enjoyed! I loved Cornwall and Devon!

Thanks for the great information. I’m taking notes. Appreciate you sharing what you liked