COUNTRY
Country Holiday Cottages
Cornwall's countryside could be our best kept secret. Sunken lanes, walled gardens, working farms, the oldest hedges in Britain.
THE COLLECTION
Mousehole
Trevene
Sleeps 6 · 3 Bed · 2 Bath
From £1,285/Week
Praa Sands
Libertine
Sleeps 8 · 4 Bed · 4 Bath
From £2,180/Week
Padstow
The Grain Store
Sleeps 5 · 3 Bed · 3 Bath
From £1,330/Week
Padstow
Peacehay Barn
Sleeps 12 · 6 Bed · 5 Bath
From £2,935/Week
Padstow
Kismet
Sleeps 8 · 4 Bed · 4 Bath
From £1,235/Week
Feock
Creek End
Sleeps 10 · 4 Bed · 4 Bath
From £2,235/Week
Bude
Ravenscourt
Sleeps 10 · 5 Bed · 4 Bath
From £2,530/Week
Padstow
Kendra
Sleeps 6 · 3 Bed · 3 Bath
From £1,060/Week
Bude
The Old Rectory
Sleeps 8 · 4 Bed · 3 Bath
From £1,030/Week
Mawgan Porth
Hay House
Sleeps 10 · 5 Bed · 4 Bath
Enquire for pricing
Bude
The Curates Wing @ The Old Rectory
Sleeps 4 · 2 Bed · 1 Bath
From £475/Week
Bude
The Stables @ The Old Rectory
Sleeps 2 · 1 Bed · 1 Bath
From £385/Week
Portloe
Fable Cottage
Sleeps 6 · 3 Bed · 2 Bath
From £985/Week
Watergate Bay
Stable Cottage
Sleeps 8 · 4 Bed · 2 Bath
From £1,530/Week
Mevagissey
Compass Point
Sleeps 6 · 3 Bed · 4 Bath
From £1,930/Week
Bude
The Old Rectory Estate
Sleeps 14 · 7 Bed · 5 Bath
From £1,870/Week
Widemouth Bay
Stoneleigh Knowle
Sleeps 7 · 3 Bed · 3 Bath
From £830/Week
Watergate Bay
The Farmhouse
Sleeps 10 · 5 Bed · 5 Bath
From £4,030/Week
Watergate Bay
Watersend
Sleeps 12 · 5 Bed · 5 Bath
From £2,285/Week
Watergate Bay
Rockpools
Sleeps 10 · 4 Bed · 5 Bath
From £1,985/Week
Rock
Balangan
Sleeps 6 · 3 Bed · 3 Bath
From £1,630/Week
Watergate Bay
1 Karn Havos
Sleeps 6 · 3 Bed · 3 Bath
From £1,430/Week
Wadebridge
Miramar
Sleeps 8 · 4 Bed · 2 Bath
From £1,085/Week
St Mawes
The Old Court House
Sleeps 8 · 3 Bed · 3 Bath
From £1,385/Week
Where these cottages are
Country Holiday Cottages across Cornwall
The country holiday cottages cottages we look after, grouped by where they are
Where these cottages are
Locations approximate — exact addresses provided on booking confirmation.
EDITORIAL
Inland Cornwall where the coast hides
There’s an unspoken rule about Cornwall holidays: stay near the coast, drive to a different beach every day, return the cottage to the agent on Saturday. It’s a perfectly good way to spend a week. It also misses about two-thirds of the county. Inland Cornwall — the bit you can’t see from the postcards — is hedge-banked lanes worn six feet below the fields, woodland that hasn’t been touched since the Civil War, working dairies and daffodil fields, walled gardens that take an afternoon to walk through, and a quiet you don’t quite get on the coast.
Two things make the Cornish countryside look the way it does. The first is the hedges. There are about 30,000 miles of Cornish hedges — stone-faced earth banks topped with thorn and hazel, not the trimmed hedgerows of southern England — and many of them are 4,000 years old, built in the Neolithic when humans first started enclosing land. They’re some of the oldest manmade structures in the country still used for their original purpose. The second is the lanes. Centuries of cart wheels, hooves, and Cornish rain have worn them several feet below the surrounding fields, so you drive through a tunnel of greenery with the sky reduced to a strip overhead.
The other unfair advantage of inland Cornwall is the gardens. Cornwall sits on the eastern edge of the Gulf Stream and is the only English county with a functioning sub-tropical climate — which is why the Victorians filled it with tree ferns, gunneras, magnolias and rhododendrons that wouldn’t survive a week in Surrey. Heligan, Trebah, Glendurgan, Trelissick, Lanhydrock, Trengwainton, Godolphin and Caerhays are all within an hour of each other, and most open from February. Several of our country cottages sit on or beside these estates — and eight are on the Tregothnan Estate itself, which at 26,000 acres is England’s only commercial tea plantation, and one of the few places in the county where you can stay inside a working private estate rather than at the edge of one.
Country cottages cluster in a few specific places. Bude is the north-coast hinterland — hedge-banked farmland, ancient lanes, the Hartland edge of the protected landscape, easy access to the Boscastle and Crackington Haven cliffs when the coastal urge strikes. Falmouth and Feock are the south-coast estuary country — wooded creeks running upstream from the Fal and the Helford, oyster beds and kayaking water, and some of the most sheltered cottages we list.
What you get with a country cottage that you don’t get on the coast: garden space (most have proper ones, several have acres), parking for more than one car, complete quiet at night, room for dogs to actually roam off the lead, and the experience of being three minutes from a working pub down a single-track lane. What you give up: a beach in walking distance. The drive to a beach is typically 10-25 minutes depending on where you are — which is shorter than the drive to find a parking space in St Ives in August. Most country cottages welcome stays of three nights or longer, and the off-season pricing is excellent.
Good to know
Questions
The things people ask before they book
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Any property where the setting is rural rather than coastal — a farm, a converted barn, a cottage on a working estate, a hamlet property surrounded by fields, or an inland village house. Most of our country cottages are at least 5-15 minutes by car from the nearest beach (a few are closer, several are much further into the hills). The unifying characteristic is the setting: hedges and fields outside the window, not a sea view or harbour. A cottage in the centre of Padstow doesn't qualify; a barn conversion on a dairy farm five miles inland from Padstow does.
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Between three and twenty-five minutes by car, depending on the property. Cornwall is a narrow peninsula — at its widest it's only 45 miles across — so even the deepest inland country cottages are within a half-hour drive of either the north or the south coast (and often both). Bude country cottages tend to be 5-15 minutes from Widemouth or Crackington Haven; Feock and Falmouth country cottages are 5-20 minutes from the south-coast beaches; Tregothnan Estate cottages are 20-30 minutes from Carbis Bay or Falmouth in opposite directions. Every property page lists the nearest beach and drive time.
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Country cottages are actually the most dog-friendly category we list — around 80% accept dogs, and many allow multiple dogs. The combination of enclosed gardens, low traffic, and proximity to farmland walks (with permission rights) means a country cottage works better for active or multiple dogs than a town centre or harbour-side property would. See Dog Friendly for the cross-filtered list.
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All of them. Cornwall's most-visited gardens — Lost Gardens of Heligan (near Mevagissey), Trebah and Glendurgan (Helford), Trelissick (Feock), Lanhydrock (near Bodmin), Trengwainton (Penzance), Godolphin (Helston), Caerhays Castle (south coast), and Eden Project (St Austell) — are all within an hour's drive of most country cottages, and many are within twenty minutes. The horticultural season runs February (camellias) to October (autumn colour), with the peak rhododendron and magnolia weeks in April and May. National Trust members get free entry to several; Heligan, Trebah, Eden and Caerhays charge separately.
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Generally yes, particularly off-peak. A country cottage with no sea view typically costs 20-40% less than a coastal equivalent of the same size, because Cornwall's pricing premium is heavily weighted to coastal proximity. Our entry-level country cottages start around £385 a week (one-bedroom, off-peak), with mid-range 3-bed country properties commonly £700-£1,200 in shoulder season.
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They're not what hedges are anywhere else in England. A Cornish hedge is a stone-faced earth bank topped with shrubs or trees — wide at the base, narrow at the top, often two metres high. They're called "hedges" never "walls" or "hedgerows" — Cornwall has its own vocabulary for this. There are about 30,000 miles of them in the county, many built 4,000 years ago in the Neolithic, which makes them some of the oldest manmade structures in Britain still used for their original purpose (enclosing livestock). They're also Cornwall's largest semi-natural habitat: in spring you'll see them blanketed in primroses, bluebells, foxgloves and red campion. Driving through Cornwall's lanes between hedges in May is one of the genuine pleasures of an inland holiday.
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Some of the best winter holidays in Cornwall are spent in country cottages. The coast gets storm-watching and short walks; the country gives you long inland walks where the wind isn't trying to take your hat off, log fires, big sociable kitchens, and the gardens still doing something interesting (camellias from late January, snowdrops in February, daffodils in March). See Winter Breaks for the cross-filtered properties, and Log Burners for the country cottages with proper open fires.
Still have questions? Talk to us →