Parnvoose

Church Cove sits at the foot of a wooded valley on the Lizard peninsula, half a mile east of Lizard village and the southernmost point of mainland Britain. It is a tiny, unspoilt hamlet: a handful of whitewashed cottages, a medieval church and a slipway to a sheltered cove where the old lifeboat once launched. Parnvoose stands just yards from the beach, a detached thatched cottage with whitewashed walls and dark-painted casements, its thatched porch framing views down the lane to the sea.

The cottage was a tea shop in the 1800s and has been in the care of just two families over the past fifty years. Recently it has been sympathetically modernised throughout: rewired, rethatched, with a new kitchen, new windows and fresh decoration, while keeping the character that makes a house like this worth saving. Beamed ceilings, exposed stone walls and timber panelling run through the ground floor, where a reception room gathers around an inglenook fireplace with a glass-fronted log burner, and a double-aspect lounge offers a second stove. Two bedrooms with pitched ceilings and deep-silled casement windows occupy the first floor, a generous landing between them large enough to serve as a third sleeping space.

Outside, the garden is far larger than the cottage suggests: a series of terraces, lawns and planted borders rising behind the house, with snowdrops, rhododendrons, palms and fruit bushes threaded along stone-walled paths. A stream runs through a strip of owned woodland opposite the front door, down to the cove. Private parking for two or three cars sits to the side. The South West Coast Path passes the door, with Kynance Cove to the west and the Helford River to the north, and the village shop, pub and post office are a short walk up the hill.