In 1929 a local production of The Tempest played in a meadow at Crean. Rowena Cade, who had moved to Cornwall in 1919 and built herself a house at Minack Point above Porthcurno, watched the play and offered her own clifftop garden as the venue for a follow-up. The production was The Tempest again, this time staged outdoors in 1932, with the Atlantic Ocean as the backdrop and the local farmers in the cast. The performance was a success. So Cade kept building. With a single Cornish helper, Billy Rawlings, and from 1955 onward another local man, Charles Angove, she carved seats and steps and corridors into the granite cliff above Porthcurno Bay over the next forty years. Most of the work she did with her own hands, often in winter, working into her seventies. The result is the Minack Theatre, an open-air amphitheatre cut into a living cliff, with the sea behind every actor. Cade died in 1983 at the age of eighty-nine, a few months short of her ninetieth birthday. The theatre still puts on twenty productions a summer. People queue for hours.

The list of people who have lived in or close to St Levan parish runs longer than the population of most of its hamlets. Bertrand Russell, philosopher and Nobel laureate, kept a house here. John Piper, the painter who illustrated Betjeman's books and designed the windows at Coventry Cathedral, lived in the parish. James Howard Williams, known as Elephant Bill, the British officer who organised the elephant evacuation through the jungle from Burma to India in 1942, retired here and wrote his books. Harry Etchel Binns of the Newlyn School of painters worked the cliffs in oils. William Bottrell, born in 1816 in the parish, collected the Cornish folk stories that preserved most of the surviving oral folklore of the region. Thomasine Dennis, the first Cornishwoman to publish a novel, brought out Sophia St Clare in London in 1806. A small parish, in other words, that has hosted some unusually large lives.

Most of St Levan's coastline is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and one of the reasons is a small purple-flowered plant called rock sea lavender, Limonium loganicum, which grows in the salt-sprayed crevices of the granite cliffs. The species is endemic to the parish. It exists nowhere else on Earth. Every known colony lies within the SSSI boundaries, which protects it from agricultural disturbance, but the plant remains vulnerable to climbers and walkers on the lower slopes. The waved maritime heath in which it lives is itself a rare habitat in Europe, the result of centuries of salt-laden gales pruning vegetation into a kind of natural bonsai. The headland of Gwennap Head, locally called Tol-pedn, draws birdwatchers from the length of Britain, who come to log the rare seabirds passing through on migration: Cory's shearwaters, Balearic shearwaters, sometimes a sooty shearwater driven in from the open Atlantic by autumn gales.

Above the sandy beach at Porthchapel sits the ruin of a small medieval chapel and, beside it, the carved granite slab and spring known as St Levan's Well. Cut into the cliff below, two stone structures may be the remains of a hermit's cell and an early oratory dating to the seventh or eighth century, in the centuries when Celtic Christianity sent its monks out to live on the western edges of Britain in stone cells overlooking the sea. A mile or so east, on the headland called Treryn Dinas, sits an Iron Age cliff fort with five ramparts and ditches, more than two thousand years old. Five Cornish stone crosses stand in the parish, one in the churchyard, one on the churchyard wall, the others at Rospletha, Sawah and Trebehor, marking the routes monks once walked between the chapels of west Cornwall. The history is layered here, and most of it is still visible if you know where to look.