Qualla: Kynance Cove

Kynance Cove: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Biggishben, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name comes from Cornish: kynans, the foot of a steep-sided valley. Step over the cliff edge above Kynance and the name makes itself plain. Below, a green-and-cream chasm opens onto a horseshoe of pale sand, four serpentine stacks rising from it like the broken vertebrae of some Devonian beast. The water between them is impossibly turquoise. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came here. So did Tennyson and Swinburne. The BBC has called it one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the South West. None of them mention the smell of the sea, but you remember it.

Read more: Kynance Cove on Qualla

Image: Biggishben | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kynance Cove: A Beach With a Geological CV

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. About 375 million years ago, the rock that would become Kynance was sitting roughly 10 km below the Earth's surface, baking under heat and pressure that turned a magnesium- and iron-rich rock called peridotite into something stranger: serpentinite. It surfaced as part of an ocean...

Read more: Kynance Cove on Qualla

Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kynance Cove: The Devil's Bellows

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 2.0. Asparagus Island is the largest of the stacks and the noisiest. At about half tide, if the swell is right, a hole on its flank starts to breathe. The sea has tunnelled along a fault deep inside the rock, and as waves slap into one end of the tunnel air punches out the other in a ...

Read more: Kynance Cove on Qualla

Image: Jim Champion | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kynance Cove: Royal Visits, Rare Moths

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Snapshots Of The Past, CC BY-SA 2.0. Kynance came into vogue in the early Victorian era as part of a wider passion for the picturesque - cliffs, light, weather, the works. Alfred Tennyson made the journey. Algernon Swinburne came down to write. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited too, lending the cove the cache...

Read more: Kynance Cove on Qualla

Image: Snapshots Of The Past | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kynance Cove: Hollywood on the Lizard

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Heaton, CC BY-SA 2.0. If the turquoise water and dragon-tooth stacks feel cinematic, that is because they keep ending up on screens. Kynance has stood in for Ross Poldark's Nampara in the 2015 Poldark series, for an island in the 2015 production of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, and for t...

Read more: Kynance Cove on Qualla

Image: Tim Heaton | CC BY-SA 2.0