Lower Porthmeor is a township, or farm hamlet, typical of this area of West Penwith, where sometimes as many as four houses are grouped round a single farmyard. The houses are not themselves of great age, but they represent a tradition as old as the tiny stonehedged fields in which they stand, fields that have scarcely changed since the Iron Age.

With their pleasant sturdy buildings, such settlements can be seen dotted all along the green coastal shelf running west from St Ives, bounded on one side by a ridge of high moor, on the other by the Atlantic cliffs. We bought the farm, which had been derelict for some years, in conjunction with the National Trust. There are two houses, separated by the farmyard, both facing south, and each with its own granite-walled garden. Nearby across the road there is a third, not part of the farmstead, but which formerly played a part in the small community as a Nonconformist meeting place.

From their back doors, it is a short walk across fields to where a little valley cuts through the cliffs to form a rocky bay.

Arra Venton, a house of somewhat mixed parentage, came on the market just after we had taken on Lower Porthmeor. There were once two buildings, a chapel and a smithy, on to one end of which a cottage was added early last century. Then, in 1952, the whole was joined together, in an eccentric if imaginative fashion. Altered again since then, and treated and painted in an unsympathetic way, it spoiled the elemental landscape of which it is part, and looked horrible from our other buildings. So we bought it, and restored it, to make it simple and unified again; and very pleasant it is.

Sleeps: 5