The Gurnard's Head

The Gurnard's Head has its name painted in white capitals across its slate roof, on a building of deep yellow beside the coast road at Treen, which makes it the easiest thing in West Penwith to find. The name belongs first to the headland on the coast nearby, a rocky promontory said to look like the head of a gurnard, not a fish anyone keeps for its looks. Charles Inkin opened the inn in March 2006 under EATDRINKSLEEP, the company he had set up, whose name is the whole of the plan: feed and water the traveller, then give them, it promises, the best night's sleep they can remember.

For us the pub was the making of the stay, and the best of it was the food and the setting. The menu is short and changes every day with whatever reaches the kitchen door: fish soup with rouille in winter, a ceviche of sea bass with leaves foraged by Fat Hen in summer. Supper is cooked to order as sharing plates, sent out when they are ready rather than when the table is. The tables to want are in the bar, warmed by log fires and lined with back copies of Giles cartoon annuals, and from March to October there is an enclosed garden facing the moor as well.

Upstairs are eight rooms, graded plainly from Small Double to Best Double. Ours was a double with a king-size bed and a shower, on bed and breakfast, and nothing about it, or about the rest of the two nights, went wrong. The rooms are dressed like a farmhouse: sash windows of small panes onto the fields, and a bedhead of green tongue-and-groove with a shelf of books along the top. Rooms look out over moor or ocean, and Room 8, with a courtyard terrace and a log burner of its own, is the one to ask for out of season.

The top of the cliffs is a little over five minutes' walk from the back door, and the South West Coast Path runs along them. The inn's favourite cove, which it describes but will not name, is a longish walk down the cliffs, and more sheltered and less crowded than Sennen Cove, twenty minutes' drive south. Caroline Davey leads foraging walks by arrangement, and the inn will try to set up mackerel fishing, depending on the weather and, it warns, the steadiness of everyone's stomach. St Ives is about fifteen minutes by car, for Tate St Ives and the Barbara Hepworth Museum, and the Minack Theatre's open-air stage above Porthcurno about twenty-five.

Children are welcome, with cots and Z-beds, and so are dogs. There is no children's menu, since the kitchen treats children as adults, but younger guests staying over get high tea in the bar from half past five, early enough to leave the sharing plates to people who can be trusted to share.