Richard Uridge visits the Roseland Peninsula, a finger of coastline on the Cornish Riviera. The Lizard shelters the region from the worst of the weather and there's a huge range of landscape to explore.

The Carricks Roads is a large waterway created after the last Ice Age from an ancient valley which flooded as the melt waters caused the sea level to rise dramatically. This created the world's third largest harbour, navigable from Falmouth to Truro. Stephen Warman, from English Nature, explains that this is the route of the River Fal which reaches the sea at Falmouth. It starts in china clay country near the Eden Project. The telltale signs of the clay sediment which covers the saltmarsh betray the fact that the landscape has been created by the waste that washed down and the estuary moved back towards the sea. Today the regulations have been tightened and Stephen says that soon the landscape will revert to being the drowned river valley which it once was.
The Fal Estuary
China Clay Museum
English Nature

Richard meets Peter Messer-Bennetts, an ex-railway man, at the fishing village of Portscatho. Peter collects stiles and footpaths and they set off around the cliffs as Peter explains that the majority of inland footpaths were the quickest way from home to work - if you worked on a farm, the footpath would develop between your cottage and the farmyard, across fields because they didn't have roads as we have today. The coastal footpaths developed because of the Preventative Service (present-day Customs & Excise). In the 1800s, these were the people who kept an eye out for shipwrecks and smugglers.