Tamar Valley

The varied topography of the region, including deep, wooded valleys, pastoral meadows, orchards and meandering rivers, means that no two days in the area are the same. The mining heritage of the area has left its mark with gaunt chimney stacks and lonely quaysides. Some of these have been preserved, including Cotehele, where you can rent canoes to explore the river from a different angle.

Cotehele House itself is perhaps the most impressive house in the whole area. Owned by the National Trust, this wonderfully preserved Tudor manor still houses a collection of enough tapestries and armour to make Henry VIII jealous. You can take in the house, its gorgeous gardens and the historic quayside by walking downriver from the quiet village of Calstock.

Downstream from Cotehele, it’s not long before the river starts to widen out heading for Plymouth Sound. Halton Quay and Pentillie Castle are passed on long meandering bends before reaching Cargreen and Landulph, by which time the river is at its widest. At Saltash you can stop and marvel at Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge in all its splendour, carrying the railway into Cornwall, as it has since 1859. Beside the railway bridge is the modern road bridge, for many the way into Cornwall.

Above and around Calstock and Gunnislake, where Newbridge, (built in the early 1500s!) offered the lowest crossing point into Cornwall until 1962, the Tamar Valley is part of the Cornwall and West Devon’s World Heritage Sites due to its mining heritage. Abandoned engine houses are dotted across the landscape from the large expanse of Devon Great Consols, just over the border, to the heights of Kit Hill, a country park above Callington.

Mining gives way to farmland beyond the village of Luckett, the river flowing beneath Horsebridge, built by the monks of Tavistock Abbey in the 1400s. Villages are far and few, the area more a landscape of tucked-away farmhouses. Between Stoke Climsland and Treburley the River Inny flows down off Bodmin Moor, to join the Tamar, a river now rarely viewed as it flows between dense woodland and rich farmland. It’s crossed by the A30 just outside Launceston, once the capital of Cornwall and still home to impressive castle ruins dating back to Norman times.

Travelling north of Launceston, the river continues to head towards the North Cornish coast, it’s no longer big enough to create a valley and just three miles from the sea it springs into a boggy area near the A39, Atlantic Highway.