Walk - Treen Coastpath
Walk information provided with help from Natural England. Map reproduced by permission of Ordnance Survey on behalf of HMSO. © Crown copyright and database right 2025. Ordnance Survey Licence number 100022021.
Route Description
This walk can be accessed by tramper, wheelchairs and pushchairs. See the detailed description at phototrails.org
- The village of Treen is situated 3½ miles east-southeast of Land`s End and lies within the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The village has a popular pub, The Logan Rock Inn, a village shop, cafe and campsite with views to both Logan Rock and nearby Porthcurno.
- Treen overlooks the Penberth Valley and sits about a kilometre inland from Treryn Dinas, an Iron Age promontory fort, or cliff castle.
People have occupied the impressive rocky promontory at Treryn Dinas since early prehistoric times. Flint tools have been found dating back to the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, period. The local eighteenth-century antiquarian William Borlase mentions a Neolithic stone circle, although there is little to be seen of it now. The ramparts and ditches of the Iron Age promontory fort are visible, however, defending the landward part of the headland, as are the remains of stone houses within. Coins and a copper brooch from Roman times have also been found here..
- At the end of the promontory is the famous Logan Rock, or rocking stone.
Logan (pronounced 'loggan') is derived from an English dialect word meaning 'to rock', and it is thought that the original word was the Norse name for 'wagging the tail'. Some 80 tons in weight, nonetheless the Logan Rock was dislodged in 1824 by a group of high-spirited British seamen, led by the nephew of poet Oliver Goldsmith. It had become a popular tourist feature, and local residents insisted that the Admiralty should make the men restore the stone. This they did, with the help of 60 men using 13 capstans with blocks and chains from the dock yard at Plymouth, at a cost of £130 8s 6d.
Local legend says that a giant and his wife once lived here, and there is a smaller logan rock nearby known as the Lady Logan Rock, supposedly the form of the giantess after she was turned to rock by the curses of the husband she had just murdered.
Treen was described by Francis Kilvert who visited Cornwall for two weeks in 1870 ... “and we came to a strange bare wild village where everything was made of granite – cottages, walls, roofs, pigs "crows" (sties), sheds, outbuildings, nothing but granite, enormous slabs of granite set up on end and roofed with other slabs.”
