Mousehole Camping 🏕

You’ve heard of campsites with a football pitch on offer, but how about the other way round? Tucked in the far southwestern corner of Cornwall, Mousehole Camping offers exactly that – a great non-league football club that has a handy campsite adjacent to their top quality pitch.

Trungle Parc is home to Mousehole AFC of the Western Premier League. The essential facilities have long been in place - hot showers, toilets and sinks inside the main changing rooms with a well drained flat field providing the ideal conditions for camping. They have 34 good sized pitches, some hardstanding with electric, some grass with electric, some just grass. If you’re a fan of that slightly makeshift, pop-up campsite feel then you can’t go far wrong here.

The main camping season runs from mid-April to mid-September but self-contained campervans and smaller motorhomes (max 7m) can book a hardstanding pitch all year round. And there might even be a free game to watch - the season generally begins in mid-July and ends in early May.

The campsite is well laid out and the facilities are very well maintained but a real benefit of the campsite is it’s wonderful location near Mousehole Harbour and just 10 miles from Land’s End.

A stroll away from the campsite entrance, the tiny village of Paul has all the endearing characteristics you’d expect of a village with the same name as your mate from down the road. Paul’s local, the Kings Arms, is a cosy, old stone haunt, with a couple of picnic benches outside, looking across to the parish church opposite. The centre of the village’s history, this towered old building is said to have been founded in the year 409 by the Welsh saint, Paul Aurelian... though a further two Saint Paul’s are also disputably it’s rightful honouree. Today’s structure actually dates to the year 1600, after the invitingly isolated Penwith Peninsula was sacked and burned by marauding Spaniards five years earlier.

The campsite or, more accurately, the football club, takes its name from the next village over, a tiny cluster of houses encircling a beautiful old harbour. It was here that the Spanish first landed, with a plaque outside the only surviving building that reads "Squire Jenkyn Keigwin was killed here 23 July 1595 defending this house against the Spaniards". Today the picture-perfect spot, speckled with colourful dinghies, boasts a sandy crescent beach when the tide is out and excellent crabbing opportunities from the far harbour walls. It’s your first discovery of many along this stretch of heritage coastline; a peninsula on the very edge of the country with all the drama, history and intrigue that you could ask for.