‘I like Cornwall very much,’ wrote DH Lawrence in a letter to his friend, the Scottish author Catherine Carswell, in January 1916. ‘It is not England,’ he continued, describing his joy at lying on the steep meadows looking down at a cove.

Lawrence was both right and wrong. The last native Cornish speaker died in 1777 – a Dolly Pentreath from the village of Mousehole – but Cornish nationalism is alive and well, as I quickly discover during my stay at St. Mawes’ Idle Rocks, with both attractive and pejorative consequences for the visitor.

Attraction to the wealth of Cornish flags (a white cross on a black background) that flutter stiffly in breezes that roll coquettishly across the landscape of twisty streets, stone cottages and green glades, is almost inevitable. Negativity of a sort comes, however, in the insistence that many Cornish locals have in calling tourists ‘emmets’ – the native word for ants.

If I must be called an ant then I’d like to think that I’m at least one of the recently discovered, more enervated ones. In 2015, biologists at the University of Arizona reported that a sizable chunk of the ‘workers’ that make up an ant colony spend the vast majority of their day engaging in one task: doing absolutely nothing.

That sounds like the correct way to enjoy Cornwall, particularly the village of St. Mawes on the Roseland Peninsula, home to the Idle Rocks. Formerly a somewhat dowdy seafront hotel, owners Karen and David Richards gave it a complete overhaul (“It was a mess of swirly carpets when we first saw it”), morphing it into something of a critics’ darling on the Cornish coastal accommodation scene.

Before checking in, I decide to get the ‘must do’s’ in the village out of the way; something that can be achieved, in full, in less than two hours. Sweet succour indeed for my ‘lazy emmet’ ambitions. The cloverleaf-shaped St. Mawes castle is hidden away from the seafront but is in unusually spic and span condition. Built by Henry VIII, its intact status is due to Parliamentarian forces surrendering quickly to Charles I’s Royalist troops during the civil war, rendering wholesale, or indeed partial, demolition by fire and cannon unnecessary

It’s a five-minute stroll from here down to the St. Mawes Gallery on the seafront where, amid the pleasant but somewhat overly benign collection of seafaring watercolours by local artists, I find the forensic, muscular, beauty of Dominique Warren’s paintings of fish and crustaceans. Her Lobster Pot depicts, with beguiling intensity, the rude, almost blistered, sunburn red of myriad claws, ganglions and antenna. Oyster Three displays an opened bivalve and is an unflinching examination of its fleshy, sparkling interior. The painting is redolent, as all the freshest oysters are, of that long, deep, iodine taste that makes you believe, as Don Draper exclaimed in Mad Men, that you’re really eating a mermaid.

My walk through the village complete, I find my way to my room at the Idle Rocks, complete with my name written on a small blackboard sign on the door. Inside, the view from the patio windows looks out over a pellucid vista of cerulean waters, dappled hillsides, impossibly cute tugboats and a sky that veers between being an ocean of evaporated milk clouds to a refulgent, crayon blue in a matter of minutes.

Karen’s personal tastes are evident throughout. An interior designer, she is fabulous company; exuding a Biba-meets-couture-on-Carnaby Street fashion sense and making me believe, despite any supporting evidence, that her younger self must have had a few roles as a formidable female ally of Roger Moore in The Saint.

Fermoie fabrics, vintage Roberts radios, full-size Aromatherapy Associates toiletries (when will other premium hotels stop being so mean with their frugal offering of miniatures?), wicker baskets redeployed as lampshades and, oh, did I mention that view? It all makes for an effortlessly chic retreat that, despite the temptation to overdo the maritime associations, doesn’t ever descend into Captain Pugwash kitsch.

Strolling along the downstairs corridor to breakfast the next morning, I find the walls framed with vintage swimsuits, some of which look as if they were custom designed to absorb as much water as humanly possible. The breakfast, happily, is equally absorbing in an infinitely more pleasant manner. The long stretch of terrace where I dine is, effectively, the sea wall and, with a couple of untypically disinterested seagulls for company, I feast on a perfectly executed dish of Cornish haddock with soft poached eggs, spinach and dill.
My complaint, if there has to be one, is that the thin, slightly leathery brown toast I was served was rather tasteless and seemed to have been purchased from the local Co-op in a hurry, rather than sourced from a proper bakery.

My visit happens to coincide with the first day of the annual, week-long St. Mawes Classic Car Festival. Set up by local couple Amelia and Tim Whitaker in 2010, their venture meant that the village’s roads were lined that morning by a 20-strong collection of vintage Ferraris and Aston Martins.

David Richards, the former chairman of Aston Martin and now owner of the auto engineering firm Prodrive, alongside the Idle Rocks, has joined the lineup in a 1969 dark blue Volante. “Sometimes it’s just easier to say to people that I can’t get away from here,” he admits, despite being privy to a helicopter landing pad just outside St. Mawes for quick, sometimes reluctant, getaways to London for business.

The Richards’ adoration of the village has resulted in one of the finest hotels anywhere on the English coastline. Returning to my breakfast terrace, I felt that I had followed the mantra of the hotel. I’m now an Idle Emmet. And, judging by the seagull’s lack of interest in stealing what remained of my breakfast, it seems even the bird life here is following their example.

Rooms from £270 per night, idlerocks.com

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