On the far western edge of Europe a rugged finger of land extends into the Atlantic Ocean; Cornwall, notorious for smugglers and pirates who used this uninhabited coastline to evade the law. But this place has never really been uninhabited. Below the waves, on treacherous cliffs and windswept moors, tenacious animals and plants survive and thrive.
Cornwall’s shoreline is continually exposed to winds that blow all the way from the Americas. Storm fronts arrive in dramatic processions battering land and life. Counteracting this violence is the Gulf Stream, bringing summer weather as warm as the Mediterranean.
Then, subtropical plants flourish, migratory birds arrive and the world’s second largest fish, the basking shark, arrives to lounge in the sun and catch plankton with its ridiculously large mouth.
Grey seals bask and breed in isolated coves where smugglers once landed their forbidden wares. Wind-shorn cliffs are alive with shags, cormorants, fulmar, gulls and nature’s fastest creature, the peregrine falcon. All the land teams with life. Life at the mercy of the surrounding sea and the weather that it brings.
‘Wild Cornwall’ takes viewers through one year of extremes following the trials of nature in a remarkable, forgotten world, out on the edge.