We're lost. Not just confused. Not one street out. We're off-the-map lost.

Another stop. Wind the window down one more time. Ask the same silly question again: "do you know where".?

"Ooorgh," says the man we've stopped while out walking his dog. "Ooorgh," shifting his cap and scratching his head.

By now, we're starting to realise this strange gargling sound isn't connected to a medical condition, but simply the accepted beginning to most sentences hereabouts.

"Go down the road," he says "and you'll see a statue of a man on an 'ooorrse."

It's the west country burr that draws out the vowels and gargles the r's at the back of the throat  - ooorrgh - and it's all down this rocky peninsula, the west country of England.

We're headed west. And south. Because Cornwall has both the most westerly and the most southerly points in mainland England - Land's End and The Lizard, respectively.

We could be in Brittany, or Wales, or any other Celtic country. But here when someone or somewhere is prefixed Pen-, Tre-, Treg- or Trew-, you could be nowhere else but Cornwall.

This bony finger of land that dabbles in both the Atlantic and the far end of the English Channel, is also surprisingly long. Or perhaps it just seems like that, with the winding roads, and the almost constant need to stop for a photograph as you turn a corner and yet another bay poses irresistibly in front of you.

My guidebook lists 100 beaches worth seeing - and seeing may be the right word, as some are so pebbly that you would hesitate to spend a few hours on them.

So, you are best to take Cornwall slowly, coming at it from the east, gently easing into it down the A30 to Exeter. Cross Dartmoor if you like, or skirt it. Head for Truro, the capital, or spend some time - days even - dipping in and out of the little fishing villages and ports tucked along the south coast.

If you choose the latter, make sure you factor in some time to spend at tiny Portloe. You hardly need to be told that this was once a smugglers' inn, with a 17^th-century ship anchored at the mouth of the tiny cove clipped out of the rocks, and shadowy figures rowing ashore with contraband.

Today's whitewashed Lugger Hotel, sparkles on the rim of the bay, with only a few fishing boats for company. The view is sublime, the food good, and if you check in overnight, you get a sunrise across the water thrown in for free.

St Mawes' bay, further west along the coast is larger and grander. Then there's Falmouth, and beyond this Lizard. Despite the name and the shape of this craggy promontory crawling into the sea - and even though the marbled greenish-grey local stone is so reptilian it is called serpentine - the fact is, Lizard's name comes from the Cornish 'lys-ardh' which means 'court on a high place'. 

Once you've seen that high place and gazed out across the western end of the English Channel, realising that the north of Spain is somewhere over the horizon, there is little more to do than wander up to Lizard town and buy some serpentine from the many artisans located here who shape the stone into anything from earrings to fruit bowls.

Just a few miles further brings you to St Michael's Mount, perhaps the best known spot along this coastline, with a family likeness to its French cousin Mont St Michel in Normandy. At low tide you can walk across the 500-metre causeway; other times you'll need to take a boat.

Within sight is Penzance, Cornwall's largest town, and beyond that again, a tiny treasure - the aptly named Mousehole (pronounced Mouz'l) its mini-bay crammed with boats.

A ramble through the Cornish countryside reveals gold, copper and tin mining relics, amazing gardens such as the Lost Gardens of Heligan, cider houses and Cornish ice cream, a seal sanctuary, the famed Eden Project (hailed as the eighth wonder of the world) stone circles and standing stones on Bodmin Moor, and, if you still have the strength - day trips from Penzance (meaning holy headland) to the Isles of Scilly scattered 45 kilometres away, off the tip of England's toe.

And finally, there's Land's End. Yes, it's commercialised - you can get your photo taken here with the date and your place of origin, so you can prove you've been here - but it's also severe and soberingly beautiful. Waves burst on those awesome cliffs and there's little point in looking out to sea. Unless you can glimpse the Isles of Scilly, there is no landfall until Newfoundland.

Cornwall is not a shire or a county. It's a duchy, belonging  to the Duke of Cornwall with a language - Cornish - that is now archaic. It's  Britain's summer playground, the hedged inadequate roads jammed each year with beachgoers, eager to play on the west coast's shining sands that seem to stretch forever.

It's summer evenings in the pub nursing a pint of Scrumpy; it's green meadows, polka-dotted with cows and horses, mazed with more hedges; it's thatched whitewashed cottages, with maybe a bed and breakfast in one of them. It's Rodda clotted cream at the far end of the country.

It's getting lost and finding a friendly local.

Ooorgh!

(by Sally Hammond)

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Find out about the world's biggest Cornish Festival. (Hint: It is NOT in Cornwall!)

Land's End