Hidden beach no one knows about is hiding amazing secret
Many of us want to escape the crowds in summertime but finding a beach with room for your towel - or even a flannel - can be a challenge when the sun shines.
But one hidden cove framed by forest is in such a remote spot - and it holds a secret that highlights just how out of sight the beach is.
Noted for its remoteness, this concealed Devon beach was no doubt frequented by smugglers centuries ago, but it also holds another secret from the Second World War - a German boat came ashore and was not spotted, due to the isolated nature of the small beach.
The rocky cove of Heddon's Mouth is located on the north side of the county, nestled on the North Devon coast between Combe Martin and Lynton.
Getting to the rocky shore which has 'super-sized pebbles' is about an hour-long hike, but the stunning views make it worthwhile. The Beach Guide website describes the cove as sitting at the mouth of the River Heddon which has 'carved a deep valley to the rear of the beach'.
The Beach Guide website explains the location: 'The beach here is made up of medium sized rounded rocks, like super-sized pebbles. The (small) river runs down the middle of the beach and to either side cliffs rise up.
"This is a fairly out of the way spot and is mostly visited by ramblers these days. In the past it was a favourite haunt of smugglers who appreciated its remoteness.
'In fact the cove is so isolated that during World War II the crew of a German U-Boat were able to come ashore in search of fresh water and relaxation without the fear of being spotted.'
You are able to park nearby, before taking on the hour-long hike to the cove, needless to say, there are no shops when you reach the destination so you'll need to go prepared. The secluded pebbly cove is well hidden by the cliffs that tower around it.
One Google reviewer describes Heddon's Mouth: 'This is a stone and large pebble beach at the mouth of the River Heddon. There is plenty of parking and it's just past the Hunter's Inn - a word of warning the back roads are very tight.
'Then it's a hike through a wooded area alongside the flowing river. Near the end you'll cross over a bridge to the other side and along to the beach. The river flows into the pebbles and sort of disappears and then reappears as several streams running down to the sea.'
Also reviewing the place on Google, Erin Urban wrote: 'Wonderful short walk to the sea with spectacular cliffs and rocky shoreline. The path is well maintained.
'The stones can be uneven and rocky in places. I recommend thicker soles or sturdy boots for those with sensitive feet. There is one place on the main path that has loose rock.
'You can walk on either side of the stream for half of the journey and switch on the way back for variety. Lunch and tea is available at the Lodge by the carpark.'
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New Statesman
10 hours ago
- New Statesman
Berlin's dark past and me
The platform was empty. It was a serene scene: the rain had stopped and the air smelled green, the trees showering droplets each time the wind blew. My mother and I carefully stepped around the puddles as we read the plaques on the very edge of the platform. 18.10.1941 / 1251 Juden / Berlin – Lodz. 29.11.1942 / 1000 Juden / Berlin – Auschwitz. 2.2.1945 / 88 Juden / Berlin – Theresienstadt. The Gleis 17 (Platform 17) memorial at Grunewald station on the western outskirts of Berlin commemorates the 50,000 Jews who were deported from the city to concentration camps by the Nazis. There are 186 steel plaques in total, in chronological order, each detailing the number of deportees and where they went. Vegetation has been left to grow around the platform and over the train tracks, 'a symbol that no train will ever leave the station at this track again', according to the official Berlin tourist website. Were we tourists? I wasn't sure. I paused at one plaque in particular: 5.9.1942 / 790 Juden / Berlin – Riga. My great-grandmother, Ryfka, was one of the 790 Jews deported to Riga on 5 September 1942. She was murdered three days later. Her husband, Max, had been arrested and taken as a labourer to the Siedlce ghetto the previous year. In 1942 he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. When I told people we were taking a family trip to Berlin, many brought up Jesse Eisenberg's 2024 film A Real Pain (released January 2025 in the UK), in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched cousins on a tour of Poland, confronting the inherited trauma of their grandmother's Holocaust survival story. But when we first started planning our trip six years ago, that wasn't the idea at all. It wasn't supposed to be about Max and Ryfka. It was about their daughter, my grandmother, Mirjam, and my grandfather, Ali, whom we called Opa. Opa's ancestry enabled us to claim German citizenship. My mother, sister and I started this process in 2017 without really thinking about it. The UK had voted to leave the EU, and Brits with relatives from all over were looking for ways to retain an EU passport. The Global Citizenship Observatory estimates that 90,000 Brits have acquired a second passport from an EU country since 2016, not counting those eligible for Irish citizenship. Article 116(2) of the German Constitution states: 'Persons who surrendered, lost or were denied German citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds are entitled to naturalisation.' The same applies to their descendants. Mirjam died in 1990, before I was born, and Opa in 2003 – both British and only British citizens. But we had his voided German passport, his birth certificate, the notice of statelessness he'd received when he came to England in 1936. It took two years, but on 3 June 2019, the three of us attended the embassy in Belgravia and were solemnly dubbed citizens of Germany. We received our passports a few weeks later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe My mother wanted to celebrate with a trip to Berlin – the city where her parents grew up, and which my sister and I had never visited. Five years later than planned, thanks to Covid travel bans, we made it, honouring Opa by sweeping through immigration on the passports he had posthumously gifted us. I was prepared for the attempts at schoolgirl German, the arguments over bus timetables, itineraries and whether or not it was acceptable to fare-dodge on the U-Bahn. What I wasn't prepared for was being struck down by tears on a suburban street, faced with the reality of how exactly I had come to be there and what my presence meant. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Photo by Jon Arnold Images Ltd My grandfather's family made it out of Nazi Germany. So did my grandmother and her siblings. Her parents did not. Max and Ryfka were typical middle-class Berliners, owners of a profitable cigarette factory. They had three children: Fanny, Mirjam and Harry. The family lived in a five-storey apartment block with a dramatic art nouveau facade – an open-mouthed deity staring down as residents came and went – on Thomasiusstrasse, on the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Around the corner, in the same affluent neighbourhood, lived the boy who would become my grandfather, Ali. They used to play together as children. Two decades, multiple emigrations and an internment in Canada later, Ali married Mirjam. My mother was born two years later. I know all this thanks to her, her sister and their cousins. A few years before the Brexit vote, they had set out to consolidate everything we know about the family – sifting through documents, photos and letters, sharing recollections of their parents, writing down everything so the story would not be forgotten. I know, for example, that the basement of the house in Thomasiusstrasse was used for meetings of their Zionist youth movement long before emigration became an urgent issue. I know when and how the siblings fled Berlin to what was then British-occupied Palestine: Fanny going first to Denmark in July 1937, then to Palestine in February 1939, where she worked at the first haute couture fashion house in Israel. Mirjam left in April 1936 via a boat from Italy. She studied horticulture before eventually marrying Ali in 1951 and moving to England. Harry arrived in Palestine on 1 September 1937, his 16th birthday. And I know, from the letters we have, how often and how seriously all three urged their parents to sell the cigarette factory and leave Berlin, before it was too late. On the pavement outside the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, set into the cobblestones, gleamed the Stolpersteine. Any visitor to Berlin will find the streets scattered with these 'stumbling stones', small brass plates, each one a memorial to a victim of the Nazis who lived at that address: their name, year of birth, where and when they were killed. The commemorative art project, begun in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig, has spread across Europe: there now are more than 116,000 stones, in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine for Max and Ryfka were laid in August 2014. My mother and her family attended; a clarinettist played klezmer music. There are eight stones for that single apartment block. The day before we visited, my mother had booked us on a tour of the Jewish quarter. Our guide told us that the aim of the Stolpersteine initiative was to compel confrontation and reflection, causing passers-by to stumble, both figuratively and physically, over this dark period of European history. Berlin is forthright about confronting its past – using art and architecture in innovative ways to do so. At the Holocaust memorial by the Brandenburg Gate, visitors get lost in an unnerving maze of concrete slabs. At the entrance to the Jewish Museum, the floors slope and the walls are set at odd angles, making the space difficult to navigate with confidence. The 'Garden of Exile' just outside the museum, designed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind to capture the disorientation of the refugee experience, is similarly slanted and boxed in by columns. The day we visited, it was raining again, the uneven cobbles slick and treacherous. The garden was empty. I slipped – and through my perhaps disproportionate tears realised there was a lot more to my new German passport than I had imagined. Everyone knows about the Holocaust. Six million Jews, more than a quarter of a million Gypsies, millions more Poles, Soviets, homosexuals and people with disabilities, systematically exterminated at death camps. I had always known that my family was in some way linked to it all, that the Holocaust was why we were in Britain in the first place, that I wouldn't be here were it not for my maternal grandparents being 'denied German citizenship… due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds'. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the Nazis. Every Jewish family I know has a story: of how their ancestors escaped, and what happened to the ones who didn't. I knew long before I visited Berlin that there is nothing special about my family's history. But I had always seen it as just that: history. The Jewish Museum's core exhibition charts the history of Jews in Germany from medieval times to the present day. The final section looks at descendants of Holocaust victims and refugees who chose to restore their German citizenship – and why they made that decision. Why had I done it? To get an EU passport after Brexit. To make it easier to work abroad one day. To give my future children the option to live anywhere in Europe. To skip the queues at immigration. All valid reasons. And all, suddenly, entirely inconsequential Staring at the memorial plaques on Platform 17, sitting on the steps of the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, losing my footing in the Garden of Exile, I felt myself slot into the narrative, the next chapter of a story that is both unfathomable and at the same time utterly unexceptional. Opa died when I was 12. He was so proud of being British. I never asked him how he would feel about us using the trauma of his past to become German for the sake of convenience. I'd always thought he'd like the idea of us reclaiming his rightful heritage, but in Berlin it seemed less clear. But I do think he would have liked the fact that we were all there in Berlin, on the streets where he and his wife grew up, laughing and crying together, realising our mother-and-daughters getaway had ended up a lot like Eisenberg's A Real Pain after all. The three of us lost in reverie outside the apartment block, picturing my grandmother coming and going. A sign by the door was engraved in looping gothic script. It looked like a memorial plaque. We struggled to decipher first the letters, then the German. Eventually we resorted to Google Translate, and discovered in lieu of the profound message we had expected, a polite request for guests to please wipe their feet. [See also: Rachel Reeves' 'impossible trilemma'] Related
Glasgow Times
12 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Rollercoaster chaser could still set record despite Storm Floris setback
Dean Stokes, 36, originally organised a trip to go on 120 rollercoasters in 32 theme parks in 16 days across the UK, travelling alongside his friend and former colleague Simon Fasolo, 44. Mr Stokes, from Brighton, East Sussex, worked for five years at Google before leaving the corporate ladder to set up his own business delivering technology training, having grown tired of being unable to try new things. The former UK head of Google for Education believes people should be encouraged to do what they love and has taken time away from work to complete and document the challenge on social media. Dean Stokes with his wife Caroline (Dean Stokes/PA) But he has since run into problems, with Storm Floris closing several theme parks less than a third of the way into his journey. Despite the route not going to plan, Mr Stokes has been contacted by Guinness World Records, who say it could still be possible to set a new record. He said: 'We were scuppered by Storm Floris, as two of the parks we visited did not have coasters operating because of wind and rain. 'The day I was in north Devon, we were meant to get on eight rollercoasters, but I only managed one. 'Most of the rides were shut down for safety reasons, which is understandable but it was really frustrating when we got there. 'I originally didn't reach out to the Guinness World Records because I just hadn't had the time in planning all the trip and I'm not really doing this to break a record, I'm doing it for fun. 'But two days ago, they emailed me asking if I'm interested in it, and I said yes – I would love to hang a world record at my office and have it in the background of my video calls. 'So, despite Storm Floris setting us back on the original plan, we could still break a record. We're just working out what the details are. It may be something like most rollercoasters ridden in a week – I'm trying to work with them to figure out what's a good record that we can set.' Mr Stokes says he has been overwhelmed by the support both on social media and in person at the theme parks. He and Mr Fasolo have been recognised by several fellow thrill-seekers and ride operators. Mr Stokes even had a follower join him for the first ride, the Pinball X at Flamingo Park in Hastings, East Sussex. He said: 'Before Storm Floris, it was going really well. Someone was even there to meet me in Hastings – a kid called Jack and his family. 'I was so surprised when I turned up and there was someone there – he said 'I'm here to ride this with you'. 'Jack said they were planning on going to a different theme park but decided to come to Hastings to join me, which was lovely. 'One of the ride operators recognised me from the videos on social media as well, which has all been so surprising but really amazing. 'I've been going live on TikTok, so when I drive quite I'm often doing quick livestreams talking to people that are joining on there. 'We're starting to build a bit of a crowd for Thorpe Park, which would be the last park of the trip – I think we're going to get a little bit of a group together to ride my last ride together which is fun.' Mr Stokes maintains that it is important to encourage people to follow their passion and not to worry about what others think when pursuing something they enjoy. He said: 'The big reason that I'm doing it is that I really think that people should just get out there and do more of what they love. 'We spend too much time these days feeling embarrassed about things that we want to do, or not pushing ourselves to do something because we're worried about whatever people might think. 'In fact, being confident to go out and do what you want is super important.' A spokesperson for Guinness World Records said they 'would like to wish Dean the best of luck in his exciting rollercoaster record attempt and look forward to receiving his application and evidence'. There is no current record-holder for the most rollercoasters ridden in a week, and Mr Stokes has been set a target of 30 to claim the inaugural title. For the purposes of his attempt, a rollercoaster is defined as a ride which features a car or cars which run along a fixed 'linear' track or rails. This includes so-called 'kiddie coasters', but excludes theme park trains and 'wet' rides, such as log flumes.
ITV News
14 hours ago
- ITV News
Brighton rollercoaster chaser could still set record despite Storm Floris setback
A thrill-seeker from Brighton who set out to ride every rollercoaster in the UK in a little over two weeks has had his plans scuppered by Storm Floris, but could still break a world record. Dean Stokes, 36, originally organised a trip to go on 120 rollercoasters in 32 theme parks in 16 days across the UK, travelling alongside his friend and former colleague Simon Fasolo, 44. Mr Stokes worked for five years at Google before leaving the corporate ladder to set up his own business delivering technology training, having grown tired of being unable to try new things. The former UK head of Google for Education believes people should be encouraged to do what they love and has taken time away from work to complete and document the challenge on social media. But he has since run into problems, with Storm Floris closing several theme parks less than a third of the way into his journey. Despite the route not going to plan, Mr Stokes has been contacted by Guinness World Records, who say it could still be possible to set a new record. He said: 'We were scuppered by Storm Floris, as two of the parks we visited did not have coasters operating because of wind and rain. 'The day I was in north Devon, we were meant to get on eight rollercoasters, but I only managed one. 'Most of the rides were shut down for safety reasons, which is understandable but it was really frustrating when we got there. 'I originally didn't reach out to the Guinness World Records because I just hadn't had the time in planning all the trip and I'm not really doing this to break a record, I'm doing it for fun. 'But two days ago, they emailed me asking if I'm interested in it, and I said yes – I would love to hang a world record at my office and have it in the background of my video calls. 'So, despite Storm Floris setting us back on the original plan, we could still break a record. We're just working out what the details are. It may be something like most rollercoasters ridden in a week – I'm trying to work with them to figure out what's a good record that we can set.' Mr Stokes says he has been overwhelmed by the support both on social media and in person at the theme parks. Along with Mr Fasolo, the pair have been recognised by several fellow thrill-seekers and ride operators. Mr Stokes even had a follower join him for the first ride, the Pinball X at Flamingo Park in Hastings, East Sussex. He said: 'Before Storm Floris, it was going really well. Someone was even there to meet me in Hastings – a kid called Jack and his family. 'I was so surprised when I turned up and there was someone there – he said 'I'm here to ride this with you'. 'Jack said they were planning on going to a different theme park but decided to come to Hastings to join me, which was lovely. 'One of the ride operators recognised me from the videos on social media as well, which has all been so surprising but really amazing. 'I've been going live on TikTok, so when I drive quite I'm often doing quick live streams talking to people that are joining on there. 'We're starting to build a bit of a crowd for Thorpe Park, which would be the last park of the trip – I think we're going to get a little bit of a group together to ride my last ride together which is fun.' Mr Stokes maintains that it is important to encourage people to follow their passion and not to worry about what others think when pursuing something they enjoy. He said: 'The big reason that I'm doing it is that I really think that people should just get out there and do more of what they love. 'We spend too much time these days feeling embarrassed about things that we want to do, or not pushing ourselves to do something because we're worried about whatever people might think. 'In fact, being confident to go out and do what you want is super important.'
