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For fourteen years, off and on, I have spent the spring on the south coast of Cornwall, in the heliotropic village of St Mawes. Only once have I seen out a full summer here, many autumns I have been away, but to date I have missed only two springs. One was in Moscow (where winter by-passes spring and heads straight to summer) and one in the Caucasus (where seasons can be selected merely by shifting altitude). These were half years - despite their own rewards they now seem somehow incomplete. For there is, to my mind at least, nothing so tantalising, so thrilling, so replete with pagan pleasures as the six-month rite which is Cornwall's passage to summer.

It begins underfoot. By Christmas the first daffodil buds have pierced the loam. Six weeks later the fields of the Roseland are a patchwork of yellow. Gone are the days when the dead travelled free on GWR and Cornish growers sent the early daffodils to London hidden in coffins. Commercial cropping is now big business. But the most exotic bloomings take place in gardens - the dazzling pink azaleas and mesembryanthemums, the psychedelic camellias and rhododenderons, the huge pre-foliage flowers of magnolia campbelii and the priapic echium which in the space of two months rises from nothing to a leafy stalk twenty-five feet high.

Come April and here on the south coast men's thoughts turn to boats. On the foreshore of the Percuil river and the bar at St Just-in-Roseland, winter covers are peeled back from fibreglass sloops, gaff-rigged day boats, pencil-thin Dragons and Sunbeams; from Pasco's boatyard and the sheds at Freshwater rise the sounds of sanding and scraping. Peter Green takes his 600 ink-well lobster pots down from the quay and, in strings of thirty, ferries them out to sea for the summer - thereby freeing five parking places for the coming "visitors".

As the days get longer and the hedgreows fatten, and the early blackthorn blossom begins to fade so the first warm breeze comes in off the sea and that is the time to take to the cliffs. Last year foot-and-mouth prevented it but I have found no more fitting homage to the changing season than to spend half a week treading the Cornish Coast Path, to stay in the still almost empty B&Bs, to loll in the fresh grass and watch the migrating terns feed in the surf-line.

It used to be enough - the cliffs, the beach, perhaps an ice-cream. But Cornwall's visitors are now more demanding. Thanks to the initiatives of outsiders, the duchy has been learning to harness her charms, to market them on a large scale, then charge for entry. Every year now brings the opening of some tasteful new attraction. First it was the St Ives Tate, then the "lost" Gardens of Heligan, then the Eden Project and now Falmouth's National Maritime Museum Cornwall. In St Mawes we have Olga Polizzi's revamp of the Hotel Tresanton and this year the Queen has chosen to begin her Jubilee Tour, like the spring itself, in Cornwall. But to the Cornish, such injections of glamour serve only to boost their attractive and deep-seated nonchalance. Rowan Atkinson arriving by helicopter? Kate Winslet buying post cards in the village shop? Pierce Brosnan sunning himself on the harbour wall? You can take it or leave it, boy. Life goes on, seasons change, visitors come and go.

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