Boskerris Hotel

Virginia Stephen signed the visitors' book at Godrevy Lighthouse in 1892, aged ten, and two years later her father wrote her name in it for her. By 1927 she was Virginia Woolf, and the lighthouse had become the one in To the Lighthouse, moved to the Hebrides, with the Ramsays' trip to it put off for ten years. Boskerris was built as a small hotel in 1931, on the Carbis Bay cliffs just outside St Ives. Its decked terrace looks across St Ives Bay, with Godrevy at one end of the view and St Ives harbour at the other. The building is white under a lichened slate roof, with louvred shutters, and inside it is bright and plain; the sitting room, with its blue sofas, opens straight onto the deck. Most of the fifteen rooms face the sea. The one to ask for is the Celebration Room, with a sunken bath in its window; at the other end of the list is the Tiny Room Non Ocean Facing, which nobody can say they were not warned about.

Recommended for couples who would rather spend the day on the coast than in a hotel: no room sleeps more than two, and nobody under fourteen stays. Carbis Bay's Blue Flag sand is a few minutes' walk below, and St Ives is twenty-five minutes along the coast path, or three on the train, for the Tate and the harbour. Dinner is on every evening, Cornish down to the steak mince in the burger, and eaten at a window full of sea. From St Ives harbour, St Ives Boats go out daily to watch the seals at Godrevy, which gets a guest to the lighthouse rather sooner than the Ramsays managed.