Morvah churchtown is a row of granite houses, a dairy farm, an old schoolhouse, and St Bridget's church, strung along the B3306 about eight miles west-southwest of St Ives. The chancel and nave were rebuilt in 1828, leaving only the two-staged, unbuttressed west tower from the 14th century - a thick, low survivor of the medieval Cornish coast. The schoolhouse has become a community gallery and café, the kind of place where the same five locals know every visitor's car. To the north, just across the road, the cliffs drop a hundred and fifty feet into the Atlantic. To the south, the moor climbs toward Chûn Castle. The whole parish sits inside the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the South West Coast Path runs along the cliffs above the village.

In 1884, quarrymen breaking ground for building stone at Carne Farm uncovered six gold bracelets buried in the soil. Three of them ended in distinctive trumpet-shaped flares; one was incised with geometric ornament. Specialists later dated them to the late Bronze Age, around 1000 BC, and concluded that the gold itself almost certainly came from Ireland - traded across the Irish Sea, perhaps in exchange for Cornish tin. The Morvah Hoard is now in the British Museum, where it sits in a case among other treasures of a prehistoric Atlantic economy that connected Cornwall to Ireland, Brittany, and Iberia long before anyone wrote it down. The locals have been agitating, on and off since 2007, for the gold to come home. Whether or not it ever does, the find is a reminder that this empty-looking parish was once a node in a continent-spanning trade network.

On the moor a short walk south of the village stands the parish's most striking monument: Chûn Quoit, a Neolithic dolmen built around 3500 BC. Four upright granite slabs hold up a single great capstone, the whole structure roughly the size of a small cabin and weathered to the colour of old bone. Beside it on the same ridge is Chûn Castle, an Iron Age hillfort dated to about 300 BC, a circular double-walled enclosure with the gateway still readable in the rubble. The Late Iron Age settlement at Croftoe nearby includes four courtyard houses of a kind found only in west Penwith, one of them with a rare "semi-detached" plan - two dwellings sharing a wall, roughly two millennia before suburban Britain rediscovered the idea.

The 19th century brought industry to Morvah, briefly, in the form of Morvah Consols mine. It was first opened sometime in the 1820s and reborn in 1851 with backing from the Levant adventurers; the surviving engine house dates from 1871. A second engine was bought in from the Balleswidden Mine. In 1875 the Stannaries Court closed the workings - they had produced only five tons and eighteen hundredweight of tin concentrate, and the wages had not been paid. When the auctioneers came to sell the mine, the miners' own anger ran them off the property; the sale was abandoned. A last attempt to reopen the workings flickered out in 1929. Today the engine house stands roofless in the heather, another Cornish ruin among many.

Morvah long held an annual fair in honour of its summer feast day, but as the parish thinned the fair could not be sustained. So Morvah now celebrates Pasty Day on the first Tuesday of every August, an entirely modern invention that has the air of an entirely ancient one. The forty-nine villagers and a few hundred visitors gather, eat hot pasties, listen to music in the old schoolhouse, and look out at the same Atlantic that their Bronze Age forebears watched. On 3 August 2011, that Atlantic delivered a particular drama: the 9,000-tonne MV Karin Schepers, en route from Cork to Rotterdam with a cargo of petroleum, ran onto a sandy beach under Trevean Cliff at 17 knots. Falmouth Coastguard had tried to raise the ship for two hours beforehand. The Sennen lifeboat and a helicopter from RNAS Culdrose arrived to find no one on deck. The crew, it turned out, were below; they refloated the ship and continued their voyage. Investigators boarded her in Rotterdam. Morvah, briefly the centre of a maritime mystery, went back to its forty-nine inhabitants and the long view north.