Spectator writers on the UK’s best beaches

Tom Holland
Trevone, Cornwall

 
Pretty much every summer, my family and my cousins head for a farm in north Cornwall, strategically situated for visits to our favourite beach: Trevone. A beautiful cove with breakers, cliffs and an unobtrusive shop, its chief appeal is the opportunity it provides for building colossal sandcastles. Each year, our ambitions grow ever more Babylonian. This summer we excelled ourselves. It was my nephew’s 21st birthday, and to mark his coming of age he wanted to build a sandcastle on a truly lunatic scale. His dream was fulfilled. Armed with industrial shovels and a wheelbarrow, we constructed a vast array of fortifications: a towering central donjon; a wall of which Hadrian would have been proud; Minas Tirith-style rings of defences; enigmatic neolithic monuments. We even had paddy fields. And then, after eight hours’ solid work, the tide came in and, like Atlantis, it all vanished beneath the waves.

Laura Freeman
Margate, Kent

 
We’ll always have… Thanet. You can keep your Paris, your Rome, your Casablanca. There’s no more romantic place on earth than Margate when it drizzles. The replacement bus service from Ramsgate, the December rain becoming sleet, the wind, the trawlers, the derelict mini golf course, the boyfriend down on one knee in the bladderwrack. I’m thinking of having a T-shirt printed: ‘I went to Margate and all I got was this lousy proposal.’ No Waste Land Margate now with its hipster Regency, its ironic rollercoasters, its semi-demi gentrification. Turner’s Margate, Tracey’s Margate. Artists will tell you about the light of St Ives, but Margate light is like a match striking magnesium. Margate has my heart.

Ross Clark
Scolt Head Island, Norfolk

 
The first time I walked the north Norfolk coast path, I slavishly followed the signs which take you away from the coast at Thornham, up through turnip fields and down through the marshes, and don’t return you to the sea and sand until Holkham, ten miles further on.