Cornwall has miles of sandy beaches, rugged coast line, rolling countryside and pretty villages within Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, including Bodmin Moor, making it a popular staycation and holiday destination. Cornwall Council consider Cornwall’s unique cultural heritage and distinctiveness to be one of the area’s major assets. They see Cornwall’s language, landscape, Celtic identity, political history, patterns of settlement, maritime tradition, industrial heritage, and non-conformist tradition, to be among the features making up its “”distinctive”” culture. However, it is uncertain exactly how many of the people living in Cornwall consider themselves to be Cornish; results from different surveys have varied. In the 2001 census, 7 per cent of people in Cornwall identified themselves as Cornish, rather than British or English. However, activists have argued that this underestimated the true number as there was no explicit “”Cornish”” option included in the official census form.
It was originally created for Cornish tin miners to enjoy while working down the pits. Accessible by boat as part of a cruise, passenger ferry or air the archipelago is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty with 2,200 residents. How you spend your time is up to you – peace and tranquillity provide a great chill out opportunity. Or if get up and go is more your style, then walking and water sports abound including windsurfing, sailing, kayaking and power boating. Although Cornwall has no official flower many people favour the Cornish heath . In recent years daffodils have been popular on the annual Saint Piran’s day march on Perran Sands although they are donated by a local daffodil grower and it is already considered to be the national flower of Wales.
From Chapel Porth, Kennack Sands and Mousehole, take an invigorating stroll across the sands. Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly received Objective One status in 1999, primarily as a consequence of their low Gross Domestic Product per head (70.3% of the EU average). This resulted from a myriad of underlying socio-economic problems including the large number of people with relatively low levels of qualifications; with lack of basic skills beyond Level two being a particular problem. Cornwall is the landing point for twenty-two of the world’s fastest high-speed undersea and transatlantic fibre optic cables, making Cornwall an important hub within Europe’s Internet infrastructure. The Superfast Cornwall project completed in 2015, and saw 95% of Cornish houses and businesses connected to a fibre-based broadband network, with over 90% of properties able to connect with speeds above 24 Mbit/s.
The invasion by Barbary Pirates remains a significant part of Cornwall’s history and the impact of these raids can still be seen in the region today. The county’s long coastline, hidden coves, and rugged terrain made it an ideal location for smugglers to hide their illegally imported goods, like as tobacco, tea, and alcohol – when imported legally, these were faced with high taxes. In the winter months, there are plenty of beaches in Cornwall with dramatic waves, but the biggest by far is The Cribbar by Towan Headland near Newquay. Cornwall has a mild climate compared to the rest of the country – while there aren’t usually heatwaves in the summer months like those that you’ll find in London, it also very rarely snows. So, wherever you are in the Duchy, even in inland destinations like Bodmin and Launceston you’ll only be a short drive away from the beach. It became a city after the Diocese of Cornwall was established in the late Victorian age, and the cathedral was built.
Norman absentee landlords became replaced by a new Cornish-Norman ruling class including scholars such as Richard Rufus of Cornwall. In pre-Roman times, Cornwall was part of the kingdom of Dumnonia, and was later known to the Anglo-Saxons as “”West Wales””, to distinguish it from “”North Wales”” (modern-day Wales). During the British Iron Age Cornwall, like all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, was inhabited by Celts known as the Britons.
