When the BBC produced the original Poldark in 1975, the producers needed a Cornish manor house that looked the part: stone-walled, slate-roofed, austere, weather-beaten, set among rough fields above the sea. They found Manor Farm in Botallack, and they kept coming back. Manor Farm played Nampara, Ross Poldark's inherited home, where Demelza scrubbed floors and the family argued in the kitchen by firelight. When the BBC remade the series for the streaming generation in 2015, the new production team came right back to Botallack, using the same lanes and the engine houses on the cliff below as Wheal Leisure. Tourists arrive with phone cameras now, walking the same hedgerows where Aidan Turner trotted past on horseback, and the village has learned to live with being a film set. The manor itself is a Grade II* listed building, dating from the seventeenth century, part of the Tregothnan estate.

Botallack sits squarely in the old tin and copper belt, and the village exists because of the mines on the cliffs below it. The Botallack Mine, with its famous Crowns engine houses, is a short walk to the north along the coast path. Inland and east, the workings of Geevor and Levant stretch toward Pendeen. The miners and their families lived in cottages here, walked down the lanes to the cliff edge, and climbed back at the end of a shift to sleep in beds within sight of the chimneys where the engines pumped water from beneath the seabed. When the mines closed, the village did what Cornish villages have always done: it shrank, it endured, it found new ways to make a living from the same rugged ground. The Cornishman across the sea in Mexico or Montana sent money home; the farmers up the road kept their cattle on the same fields their grandfathers had cleared.

Roger Hilton came to Cornwall in the 1950s and ended up in Botallack, one of a generation of British abstract painters drawn to the light and the loneliness of the Penwith coast. Born in 1911, trained at the Slade where he won the Orpen Prize in 1930, Hilton was a difficult man and a major painter: drinking, brilliant, prone to making enemies and great pictures in roughly equal measure. He died in Botallack in 1975. His wife Rose Hilton, born in 1931, lived on in the village until her own death in 2019. A post-impressionist painter in her own right, she had spent decades in Roger's shadow, then emerged in her late years as a celebrated artist, with a solo show at the Newlyn Art Gallery in 1977 and a retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2008. Their cottage and studio sat in the lanes of Botallack: two artists who watched the same Atlantic light from the same windows for half a century.

The headland to the northwest of the village carries an older name. Lae Maen Veor in Cornish means the great stone ledge, and that is what it is: a flat-topped granite promontory thrusting into the Atlantic, with the open sea on three sides. Locals still call it Botallack Head. Beyond it, a mile offshore, the Brisons rise out of the swell. The community radio station broadcasting on 96.5 and 97.2 FM goes by Coast FM now, but it was Penwith Radio before, a small voice on a small frequency speaking to the villages strung along the cliff. Botallack is the kind of place that does not pretend to be more than it is. A few hundred people. A manor. A film set. Two great painters who chose this end of the world over any other. And a sea that has been wearing the cliffs back for as long as anyone has been here to watch.