The Cubert Common walk is a short, easy trail of around 1.6km, starting and finishing at Porth Joke car park.
Cubert Common itself is unusual for two reasons. It is one of only a handful of enclosed commons left in England, and the sheep that graze its sandy grassland are said to produce especially sweet mutton. The common also carries an old local legend. According to the tale of Langarrow, a prosperous city once stood here, complete with seven churches, until convicts brought in to work the mines and shift sand from the River Gannel intermarried with local women. Standards in the city slipped, and a storm of biblical proportions is said to have buried the whole place under sand.
That sand is still very much part of the landscape today. Cubert Common forms part of a much larger system of blown sand running some eight kilometres up the coast towards Perranporth. Sheltered by the younger, still shifting Holywell Dunes nearby, the sand here has had time to settle, colonised over the years by grasses and other plants that bind it into a more stable, undulating dune landscape.
That stability is also what makes the common such rewarding ground for wildflowers. The underlying sand is calcareous, producing base rich soil that is genuinely unusual for Cornwall, where most ground tends towards the acidic. It is one of the best places in the county to find plants that need that alkaline soil to thrive, among them cowslip, pyramidal orchid, salad burnet, and lady’s bedstraw. From early spring, the open grassland fills with primrose, cowslip, and squill, while damper pockets turn yellow with flag iris. Skylarks chatter overhead throughout, with the sound of the Atlantic never far away.
Underfoot the going is easy and mostly grassy, following sandy paths and tracks across open ground, with dogs welcome under close control where livestock are grazing.
Weather
Plan The Walk
Places along this walk
Where to park
- Poly Joke NT
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