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The perfect crescent shape of Llandudno’s northern shore is edged with an arc of graceful white stucco terraces and hotels looking out to the Irish Sea and ending in a pretty blue and white painted pier. The western shore, where Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice, spent her summers as a child, looks towards Conwy Bay with its famous mussel beds. … . . . → Read More: Llandudno  When you first arrive in Clevedon from wooded gorges and the shadow of hills, you have no sense of the sea, and it’s a shock to suddenly find yourself out on the blustery front, where the little bandstand look as though it will take off and the Scots pines in the public gardens are bent horizontal by the wind. . . . → Read More: Clevedon Alnmouth faces away from the sea and into the sheltering crook of its beautiful river estuary. Its harbour was its fortune from neolithic times, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was a prosperous grain port which, when Wesley made a brief stop there, was “rife with smuggling and famous for all types of wickedness”. . . . → Read More: Alnmouth “Torquay is a magic town built of high harbour walls and shining palaces beside the sea,” wrote Nevil Shute in Lonely Road. Today, you only have to blur your vision a little to obscure the odd 1960s block towering awkwardly among the elegant stucco housing, and the magic is still there. . . . → Read More: Torquay Brighton has always been exciting. In 1782 Fanny Burney described plunging into the sea here at 6am on a November morning “by the pale blink of the moon”, and two years later when “Prinny” (who later became the Prince Regent) first came to stay here with his fast-living uncle, the Duke of Cumberland (who ran a gaming house and started Brighton Races) he was smitten. . . . → Read More: Brighton Although it has grown into one of Cornwall’s largest towns, Falmouth still has all the stirring romance of a Patrick O’Brian novel. In the old heart of it there are sudden glimpses of water and the noise of clinking masts. For two hundred years it was the last stopping place for ships sailing west across the Atlantic, and the first port of call for those homeward-bound. . . . → Read More: Falmouth On rainy days, when Polzeath’s surf is flat and the wind too slight for sailing at Rock, the regular holidaymakers, who have been coming to the estuary for generations, take the passenger ferry to Padstow as a diversion. . . . → Read More: Padstow St Ives is romantic. It sits between two beaches, each giving onto a different aspect of the ocean. Today, looking down for the first time on the jumbled lichen-smothered slate roofs of the town which fall away to the curving sweeps of bay, it’s hard not to echo Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse – “Oh, how beautiful!” . . . → Read More: St Ives There are ink-black splashes of woodland on the edges of huge cereal fields in this wide-skied stretch of Norfolk where Old Hunstanton lies back from the sea. A small lane trickles down beside the church to the kempt Arts and Crafts clubhouse overlooking the golf course. The village retains the olde worlde character which Henry Le Strange, the Squire of Hunstanton Hall and Lord High Admiral of the Wash, so loved. . . . → Read More: Hunstanton Mumbles became renowned for its multitude of pubs, many of which have now closed. But The Antelope in still there – where Swansea’s most famous son, Dylan Thomas, liked to drink when he was, as he put it, “a bombastic adolescent provisional bohemian” . . . → Read More: Mumbles |
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