St Augustine's Catholic Church, St Austell

The red-brick Victorian facade of St Augustine's dominates a quiet corner of St Austell town centre, impossible to miss if you're wandering the streets between the clay heritage sites and the harbour. It's a proper working Catholic church, built in the 1880s when the town was booming on china clay wealth, and you can still feel that period solidity in its stone and stained glass.

You can pop in during opening hours - usually weekday afternoons and around Mass times - and it won't cost you anything. The interior is what you'd expect: soaring ceiling, rows of wooden pews, traditional altar arrangement. It's not ostentatiously grand, but it's got a genuine calm to it, the sort of place where an hour drifting about and reading the wall plaques actually feels time well spent rather than a tourist obligation.

If you're staying at one of the nearby parks - East Crinnis, Pentewan Sands, or Heligan - it's close enough for a morning wander before heading out to the Lost Gardens of Heligan or down to the beaches. Not a destination on its own, honestly, but paired with St Austell's other attractions (the clay pits, the town museum) it fills a gap nicely on a rainy afternoon. History types and anyone interested in Victorian Cornwall will get more from it than most. Worth twenty minutes while you're in town, less worth a specific trip.