Just over the Cornwall border, Cotehele is one of the least altered late-medieval houses in England. The Edgcumbe family built it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on a steep wooded bend of the Tamar, and because they moved out to a grander seat at Mount Edgcumbe in the 1550s, the house was never modernised. The result is dim, granite-walled rooms hung with tapestries and lit only by small windows — closer to the texture of Tudor domestic life than anywhere else you can visit.
Outside, terraced gardens drop down to the Tamar at Cotehele Quay, where the National Trust keeps the restored Tamar sailing barge Shamrock. The Discovery Centre at the quay tells the story of the river's market gardens. A path through Cotehele Mill brings you back up to the house in a comfortable loop walk.