‘Dizzying coastal paths, quiet beaches and dolphins': readers' highlights of the UK coastline
The Leas near South Shields (a few miles north of Sunderland) is a beautiful stretch of limestone cliffs and coastal grassland that is a haven for sea birds and wildflowers. There are footpaths and bridle paths across the Leas, so it attracts cyclists, dog walkers and runners all year round. The local parkrun uses the paths and it must be one of the most scenic in the country. The rock stacks along the coast are a great place for spotting cormorants, fulmars and kittiwakes among others. No matter the weather I love to walks these paths and feel the fresh sea breeze through my hair. A wonderful place.Matty
Guardian Travel readers' tips
Every week we ask our readers for recommendations from their travels. A selection of tips will be featured online and may appear in print. To enter the latest competition visit the readers' tips homepage
-
Fife is a glorious peninsula bordered by a brilliant coastal path that takes in a variety of beaches, fishing villages and is an area rich in wildlife and diverse landscapes. The area from Crail to St Andrews is of particular beauty, with several gorgeous places to stop for lunch, such as Cambo Gardens cafe near Kingsbarns and the Cheesy Toast Shack at East Sands in St Andrews. There are loads of places to stay and use as a base to explore the region. The larch-clad cabins at Kinkell Byre offer the opportunity to rest in style. And farther north are the wonderful forest trails and sand dunes of Tentsmuir. Stevie Kirkwood
Wander the banks of the River Fal and Helford River in south Cornwall, through ancient Celtic rainforest, where the trees meet the sea. This rare habitat gives us a glimpse of prehistory, with lichen-laden branches, crisp, damp air and some of the UK's rarest wildlife. It feels otherworldly, yet oddly familiar. Amy
Penmon Point on the easternmost point of Ynys Môn is a great place to watch for sea birds. The stunning Trwyn Du lighthouse looks out to Puffin Island, and if you're lucky, one might fly right past you. But we have seen even more magic there when it gets dark. If conditions are just right, the waves light up electric blue with bioluminescent plankton as they crash over the pebbles. For refreshments, the Pilot House Cafe is nearby and has a fantastic view from its garden. Chris Jones
You need to consult your tide tables before visiting Sunderland Point on Morecambe Bay. This extraordinary place of sea-sucked mudflats, salt marsh and vast skies is cut off daily at high tide. I cross the causeway in May when the sea pinks (sea thrift) are flowering and the air is bright with the cries of birds – oystercatchers, curlew and redshanks. It feels remote, but in the 18th century Sunderland Point was a bustling port for Lancaster's transatlantic trade, which brought prosperity but also inhumanity. A walk round the peninsula leads to the grave of an unknown child slave abandoned here in 1736, now adorned by visitors with painted stones. Its bleak beauty will break your heart.Morag Reavley
Sign up to The Traveller
Get travel inspiration, featured trips and local tips for your next break, as well as the latest deals from Guardian Holidays
after newsletter promotion
I've been walking my dog on the same stretch of coast for four years and I never tire of the sheer strangeness of it. Culmore Point is where Derry's River Foyle meets the North Atlantic. Some days you can see a line in the water where the silt-filled Foyle meets the sea. Beautiful old-money houses look out across the water to a power station and chemical plant. Farther downstream the weird treeless landscape of the reclaimed land of Eglinton Embankment catches the eye. Spare a thought too for the young men who trained on these river beaches in May 1944 for the Normandy assaults a month later.Keiran
From West Kirby on Wirral, you can walk across the tidal flats of the Dee estuary to the red sandstone formations of Little Eye, Middle Eye, and Hilbre Island, a string of uninhabited islands offering naught but spectacular nature. In summer you can spot grey seals hauling themselves on to sandbanks, and three types of terns (common, little and sandwich) darting past. Listen out for skylarks and meadow pipits too. For an extra challenge, search for the Triassic-era Chirotherium footprint. Always check tide times carefully, and for extra awe, time your return to the sun setting low, framed by the distant Welsh hills.Sarah
Cycling along the North East Coastal Trail from Portsoy to Macduff in Aberdeenshire is my idea of heaven. In stunning coastal countryside you cycle through charming fishing villages with historic harbours. I've spotted dolphins, porpoises and seals on the route. On a rocky coastline just beyond Macduff, there's an old tidal pool at Tarlair. Though no longer used for swimming, its beautifully restored art deco tea pavilion is the perfect spot to refuel before your journey back. While there, take a short wander to the secluded Salmon Howie beach tucked behind the cliffs – it's such a beautiful spot.Peter Diender
When, as a child, I read Z For Zachariah, I imagined a landscape with the exact fin-du-monde energy of the East Yorkshire beach from Ulrome to Bridlington. On this stretch of Holderness, you'll find neither the Norfolk chalk boards of iced latte and shakshuka nor the monastic ghosts of farther north. But if six miles of uninterrupted beach walk – in the company of nothing more glamorous than pure air, weather and proper decay (not the genteel sort) – is your thing, this is a place you should visit. Morcheeba soundtrack optional. Tired legs and a cleansed soul guaranteed.Eliza Ainley
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
34 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
TOM UTLEY: From the bliss of my own bed to a decent cuppa... why the best part of any holiday is the heart-lifting relief of coming HOME
Oh, how heartily I agree with the 52 per cent who say one of the best parts of going away on holiday is returning to the comforts of home. My only quibble is that it's the best part, bar none. We may look forward all year to getting away from it all for that summer break, studying the travel pages, thumbing through the brochures and counting the days until we can pack our bags and head for the heaven of our dreams. But on average, apparently, it takes only five days away for us to start missing everything we've left behind, from the bliss of our own beds to our familiar routines, gardens and pets and our favourite TV programmes – or simply a decent British cuppa, with proper British milk. So says a survey of 2,000 holidaymakers from the UK, published this week by the sofa retailing firm, DFS. True, there was a time in my younger days when I wished that my holidays could go on for ever. I longed to explore the whole wide world, absorbing new sights, sounds, tastes and experiences, while going home just meant the start of a new term or, later, returning to the grind of the office. But since money was always tight in my bachelor days, I never got round to venturing beyond Europe. And when marriage and the four boys came along, further clipping my wings – except on the handful of occasions when my employers sent me abroad for work – I resigned myself to putting my wilder ambitions on hold until our finances looked up and our sons were old enough to fend for themselves. These days, with the boys now grown up, the school fees behind us, the mortgage paid off – and Rachel Reeves's dreaded Budget still weeks away – I can at last afford to take the two of us just about anywhere in the world we may fancy. Yet this summer, we found five days on the Isle of Wight more than enough. The trouble is that my feet stopped itching years ago, and Mrs U seems to feel much the same way. Far from yearning to travel, I find my heart sinking at the very thought of going through all the palaver, inconvenience and discomfort of another holiday abroad. I'm not a bit proud of the death of my spirit of adventure. On the contrary, all those people who say life starts at sixty or seventy – and spend their retirement swimming with dolphins, going on safari in Africa or sailing round the world – make me feel terribly inadequate. It's just that when I look back over a lifetime of holidays, I remember only a litany of disasters, and almost constant anxiety. There was the time in Pompeii, which I've mentioned before, when our then three-year-old eldest fell, bottom-first, into an enormous Roman wine-jar of the first century AD, with only the top of his head and the soles of his shoes visible. For several interminable minutes, as we heaved on his shoulders and ankles, I feared that we'd have to smash this priceless artefact to get him out, and I'd have to answer for the consequences to my bank manager (not to mention the Italian police). Then there was the holiday a couple of years later, at a friend's villa in Tuscany, where the same boy broke his arm on day two, after laughing so hard at a funny book that he fell on to the stone floor from his perch on the arm of a sofa. I still shudder at the memory of our long drive in the hire car to the nearest hospital, with the poor boy screaming in pain in the back. Indeed, trips to hospital feature prominently in my memories of holidays abroad. There was the time in Normandy when son Number Two suddenly developed a mysterious illness. He wouldn't eat or sleep, and when he tried to walk he developed a terrifying limp. Frantic with worry, and fearing he had picked up something like polio (all right, neither of us is medically literate), we drove him to hospital in Bayeux. As he hobbled round the consulting room, in apparent agony, two doctors said they were as baffled as we were. It was only when they told him he'd have to stay there a couple of nights for tests that he miraculously recovered in an instant, and walked down the hospital corridor without a trace of a limp. I'll never forget what one of the doctors said to his colleague, in French, presumably thinking I wouldn't understand: 'These stupid English. They watch far too much television!' Then there was the time near Toulouse, when I managed to skewer the top of my head on a spike hanging down from a chandelier. Blood gushed from my head like a Roman candle, and our gite soon looked like the set of a gruesome Quentin Tarantino movie. Before I knew it, I was lying in an antiquated ambulance – a converted Citroen Deux Chevaux, I seem to remember, though I wouldn't swear to it – on my way to have my wound stapled up in A&E. As for lesser holiday disasters, these include suffering a blow-out on our way to Saint-Malo, when we were already running late for the ferry home and, like so many other muppet tourists, having my pocket picked in Rome. (To adapt the famous saying: 'When in Rome… cling on to your wallet for dear life.') Yes, such disasters and mishaps can also befall us in dear old blighty. But the stresses are multiplied a hundredfold when they happen abroad, with an unfamiliar language and bureaucracy to contend with. Indeed, even when everything goes smoothly on a foreign holiday, I find the anxiety kicks in from almost the moment we leave home. Have we locked the rear bedroom window, cancelled the papers and remembered to turn off the gas? Which of us has the passports and the tickets – and where the hell did I put the booking reference for the hire car at the other end? Then there's that exhausting business at the airport – the endless, snaking queues at the check-in desk, passport control and customs, and that ridiculous rigmarole with the belts and the shoes at security. It's another interminable wait at the other end, for Mrs U's suitcase to appear (generally last) on the carousel. Then the hassle at the hire-car kiosk and that first, nerve-racking hour of getting used to driving a strange vehicle, on the wrong side of a strange road. That's not to mention the constant demands on our mental arithmetic, as we struggle to translate foreign currencies into pounds and pence. (One of the few things Mrs U and I have in common, apart from 45 years of marriage, four sons and five grandchildren, is that we're both completely hopeless at maths). Enough to say, oh, the heart-lifting relief of that first glimpse of the Isle of Wight or the White Cliffs of Dover, from the aeroplane window or the deck of the ferry on the journey home. And, oh, the joy of ordering a favourite takeaway and cracking open the duty free on our arrival in our own dear house, with our own familiar kitchen, our own telly and our own comfy bed. No, there's no question that this is the best bit of any holiday. It's just such a shame that we have to go through all the worries and bother of travel before we can fully appreciate it.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Tourist is left paralysed after being thrown from 'kamikaze' seat on Devon sea safari
A female tourist has been paralysed for life after being thrown from a 'kamikaze' seat on an inflatable boat hit by a high wave as it left a harbour. The RIB Lundy Explorer had left Ilfracombe harbour in North Devon for a sea safari trip in June 2023. A Marine Accident Investigation Board inquiry said it encountered a high wave as it left the harbour, which caused it to slam into an oncoming wave. The report says that a passenger was sitting in a 'jockey' seat in the front of the RIB, where the highest shock loads were experienced. The passenger was dislodged from their seat and suffered a fracture of their spinal column, resulting in permanent paralysis. The MAIB report said local weather conditions had deteriorated quickly, which resulted in choppy seas and bigger waves, which the RIB skipper had not expected. The position of the jockey seats was unsuitable for single occupancy, the report added, as they exposed passengers to high shock load as the boat slammed into waves. And the pre-departure safety briefing did not include the use of the seats and the passengers were unaware of the risks. The MAIB also found that concerns were expressed by many people in the industry about the use of jockey seats on high-speed RIBs. It said: 'Several operators, manufacturers and skippers were consulted during this investigation, and all acknowledged that the front seats of a RIB could present comfort issues, often referring to them as 'kamikaze' or 'suicide' seats.' The investigation found that the boat was hit by three waves, which caused the bow of the boat to land on the water 'with force, bringing the RIB to a sudden stop'. The person on the jockey seat 'struck their face heavily on the handhold in front of them'. It added: 'The dislodged passenger was wedged between the jockey seat pedestal and the RIB's sponsor, in a twisted position with her right leg over the seat. The deckhand attended to the dislodged passenger, who said that she could not feel her legs.' The boat was turned around as soon as the waves allowed and the skipper tried to call the company owner by mobile phone but received no reply. The coastguard was not contacted via the road and the report stated that his 'might have delayed the emergency response and prevented medical advice on handling a suspected spinal injury'. The woman was carried ashore by the owner and skipper as her sister called an ambulance at 12.27pm. She was taken to the hospital in Plymouth by air after a lifeboat team and an air ambulance were dispatched. The Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents, Andrew Moll, said: 'This dreadful accident highlights that even when operating at slow speeds in harbour areas significant injuries can still occur on RIB rides when inappropriate seating arrangements are used. 'Despite being in good health and wearing appropriate safety equipment, she was dislodged from her seat and sustained a spinal injury that has resulted in permanent paralysis.' He urged all operators to take action and Ilfracombe Sea Safari Ltd is recommended to implement a safety management system. The MAIB report said that since 2001 it has been notified of 54 accidents during RIB rides that have resulted in lower back injuries, 17 of which caused spinal fractures. A spokesman for Ilfracombe Sea Safari told the Times: 'It was two and a half years ago and [we are] now under new management since early 2024. 'We have implemented all the safety guidelines outlined in the report and more. We work to the highest standards and go above and beyond to ensure safety for all of our passengers and crew.'
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
September Tube strikes could bring week-long travel chaos to London
London Underground workers will stage a series of strikes next month that could bring travel chaos to the capital. On 5 September some union members at the Ruislip depot in west London will walk out for 24 hours, then, from 7 September, various groups will walk out across the Tube network each day. The Independent 's travel correspondent, Simon Calder, explores the 'serious impact' the planned wave of strikes will have travellers and commuters. The Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) said that management had refused to engage seriously with its demands over pay and conditions.
