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A blizzard’s howling, your ballcocks have frozen and there’s an icicle hanging
off granny. So... who fancies a trip to the seaside? Bear with us here:
we’re not talking buckets and spades and sand in your sandwiches. Of course
not. We’re talking long, romantic walks on deserted shores, bruised skies
and squalling sea birds, toasty firesides and a hot toddy to defrost your
nose in at the end of the day. The complete midwinter cobweb-blaster. Here
are five British beach weekends that feel really inspiring in the cold.
Manorbier Beach
Manorbier, Pembrokeshire
A white castle looms on a platform above the beach, a cracked stone table
decays picturesquely on the clifftop, and a lissom chap with a goatee beard
flexes a shapely leg among the dunes. No wonder the BBC chose Manorbier as
its Narnia.
Nearby are the softer sands of Barafundle and Broad Haven, but save them for
summer — in winter, you want Manorbier, with its rainbow of cliffs arcing
into the beach and its purple sandstone foreshore crumpled into weird folds,
like petrified ridge-and-furrow. Sown with thin rock pools that capture
every sliver of cold sunlight, they are especially dramatic with a dusting
of Narnian frost to set them off.
The BBC turned 12th-century Manorbier Castle into Cair Paravel in the 1980s,
and its turrets fold out into the bay like something from a child’s pop-up
book. Start there, walk the beach, then clamber south on the cliff path for
tea or a tot of something stronger atop the King’s Quoit, the table-shaped
Neolithic cromlech that commands the headland. The Tumnus-like figure you
saw in the car park, by the way, was a frostbitten surf dude with more Sex
Wax than sense.
Make a weekend of it: the castle isn’t open to visitors in
winter — which makes lodging there even more special. The house inside the
ramparts sleeps 12, with prices starting at £1,250 per week in winter (01326
340153, www.manorbiercastle.co.uk).
Failing that, Cardeeth Farmhouse (01646 650003, www.cardeethfarmhouse.co.uk;
doubles from £50), a few miles inland, is an impeccably welcoming B&B,
with a great food pub, the Carew Inn (01646 651267), nearby. Welsh black
steak pie costs £8.50. For melty Pembrokeshire sea bass served by
candlelight, don’t miss the ever-excellent Plantagenet House restaurant in
Tenby (01834 842350).
Dunwich Beach
Dunwich, Suffolk
Southwold is for sandlarks, Aldeburgh for artists, but the locals go to
Dunwich — mainly because, well, it isn’t there. Ronald Blythe, writer of the
seminal Suffolk memoir Akenfield, says: “It’s not just a haunted place, it’s
a ghost. A place of the imagination. England’s Atlantis.”
Epic stuff. Dunwich, you see, is the city the sea swallowed. It was once an
industrious medieval port, with 12 churches, three abbeys, shipyards and
hospitals, but what remains today is little more than a straggle of brick
cottages, gamely arranged along the crest of seaside shingle as though
coughed up in compensation by the tide. There is a neat and tidy inn, the
Ship, a shack-style cafe serving rather excellent fish and chips, and that’s
it.
No matter: you’ve come ghost-hunting — and for solitude. More than anywhere,
Dunwich embodies the elusive beauty of the Suffolk coast, its creeks and
marshes and reed beds shifting and disappearing under an immensity of sky.
Strike out along the collapsing sand cliffs to find shards of the old
friary, or perhaps a grave bone jutting out above the shore; and keep going
to Dunwich Heath nature reserve, a Lear-like expanse of blasted heathland
where red deer bellow and red-throated divers arrow into the surf. The
tearoom in the coastguards’ cottage will sort you out with hot chocolate,
then you’ll be ready to crunch back along the shore, listening for the bells
that still toll, some say, from sunken steeples under the waves.
Make a weekend of it: the Ship Inn (01728 648219,
www.shipinndunwich.co.uk) is every bit as piratical as you might have hoped:
wood-stove, captain’s chairs, nautical prints. It does simple doubles from
£75; bring your own parrot.
Or check out Suffolk Cottage Holidays (01394 412304,
www.suffolkcottageholidays.com), which has bags of nooks near Dunwich,
including the Apple Store on Westleton village green. It sleeps four, with
prices starting at
£256 for three nights. Aim to be there on a Thursday, so you can take in ye
olde Suffolk “squit night” at the Eels Foot Inn in Eastbridge (01728
830154), a weekly frenzy of guitars, banjos and concertinas.
The Minsmere bird reserve (01728 648281, www.rspb.org.uk), an RSPB flagship,
has guided walks all winter long to seek out marsh harriers, wildfowl and
otters.
Church Cove
Gunwalloe, Cornwall
If you want your winter shores really to spit and snarl, look to the Lizard.
The dead-end lane that snakes out onto the peninsula, from Helston to Church
Cove, surfs perilously close to the clifftops above Halzephron Cove,
wave-shattered and spiked with memorials to unlucky mariners dashed to their
doom nearby.
That explains the name, then — Halzephron is Cornish for “Cliff of Hell” — and
likewise the positioning of St Winwaloe’s Church, one of seaside Britain’s
more astonishing ornaments, right on the strand at Church Cove. In winter,
it’s a heartbreakingly evocative spot: the Norman bell tower jutting
straight out of a crag, the wind hammering against the ancient door and the
sailors’ graves being slowly inundated by sand, as though the sea is
ravenous to reclaim them.
The whole beach has a soulful, sequestered feeling: wander out along the coast
path from the smugglers’ inn at Gunwalloe (see below), investigate the
church and, if you feel lucky, pack a metal detector and go treasure-hunting
for the last few doubloons spilt from broken Portuguese galleons. Beware,
though: that beep could be the shoe buckle of one of the 100 drowned men
buried behind the dunes when HMS Anson went down in 1807.
Make a weekend of it: the nearest slice of civilisation is
the 500-year-old Halzephron Inn (01326 240406), a mile up the lane. It’s
just the job when you stagger in, mad-haired, from the beach: stooping
ceilings, raging woodburner, cockle-warming seafood chowder at £7.25. It has
a couple of simple bedrooms, too, for £84 B&B.
For a gull’s-eye view, though, try to bag nearby Chydane (01326 241232,
www.chydane.uniquehomestays.com), on the brink of the cliffs. It has just
two rooms, lovely hosts (Carla and John) and a white, bright, contemporary
feel: from £40pp, B&B.
Beadnell Bay
Beadnell, Northumberland
Here’s the most romantic beach on a coast that glitters with them: a lonesome
curl of sand caught between battered sea and black-and-blue sky. Two wide
miles of not-much-ness — and in winter it’s entirely for you, your carefully
selected loved one, and the (many, overwintering) birds. Unless, of course,
you decide to impulse-buy a dog.
Start on the Blytonesque quayside in Beadnell village, so dinky that you feel
you should be able to put a pound in a slot and manoeuvre the herring boats
around with a joystick. Then make for the beach, which cries out for
bootlessness whatever the weather. Bare your soles, leg it for the sea — and
prepare to learn the true meaning of cold.
It’s a huge, brine-blasted stride south from here, past the Newton Links
wildfowl reserve, to Snook Point, where you can go rock-pooling among the
brilliantined black outcrops of volcanic basalt. Your real reward is just
beyond the headland, though, in the enchanted hamlet of Low
Newton-by-the-Sea, with its dapper square of old fishermen’s terraces, its
peerless inn (the Ship) and its views down to Dunstanburgh Castle, which
rears spectrally up from the distant shore.
Make a weekend of it: for wild-eyed remoteness, book the
National Trust’s utterly basic Lookout Cottage — a bring-your-own bedding,
outside-loo affair, with godlike views over the beach. It sleeps four, with
prices starting at £149 for three nights (0870 458 4422,
www.nationaltrustcottages.co.uk).
There are plenty of snugger options in Beadnell, including Beach Court (01665
720225, www.beachcourt.com): log fire, leather armchairs, tide lapping right
under the windows. Doubles start at £99, with three nights for the price of
two available until January 31.
The Ship Inn (01665 576262), barely aground at Low Newton, is almost worth the
trip on its own, especially if you order its crab salad stottie — straight
off the boat, undressed and served on a roll as big as a dinner plate
(£5.65). The other essential treat hereabouts is take-home kippers from
Robson’s smokehouse in Craster (01665 576223).
White Park Bay
Ballintoy, Co Antrim
There is something supernatural about White Park Bay. For a start, the sand’s
a funny colour, and it makes strange noises. The beach glows hot pink,
especially in the low light of a winter dawn, and it sings when the wind
rips through it, such is the cleanness and smoothness of its grains. That’s
not all. Cattle maraud along the shore, and the shaggy domes they inhabit
are not all dunes — one is stacked with the skeletons of Bronze Age men. A
local might tell you that fairies file out of the top of it on May mornings.
And we haven’t even talked about the petrified elephant.
These “singing sands” stretch for two miles under a crescent of startlingly
white chalk cliffs, hung out to dry between the toylike harbours of
Portbradden and Ballintoy, with their Victorian lanterns and salmon
slipways. They say White Park is the most painted beach in Ireland, and you
scramble down from the clifftop into a palette of pinks and oranges and
greens, delving for ammonites exposed by the January storms on your way
towards Elephant Rock — a woolly mammoth frozen for ever as it fled a
volcanic eruption, so they say.
It’s revivifying, vaguely desolate, perfect for winter. Wrap up warm.
Make a weekend of it: at Whitepark House (028 2073 1482,
www.whiteparkhouse.com; doubles £90, B&B), a pebble’s pitch from
the beach, Bob Isles dispenses “Ulster fry” breakfasts and droll tales about
the day he won the AA Landlady of the Year award.
But the stand-out digs for winter are along the coast at Bushmills Inn (028
2073 3000, www.bushmillsinn.com; doubles from £138), the poshest place
you’ll ever be allowed to poke a proper peat fire.
Up the road, guided tours at the Bushmills Distillery (028 207 33218,
www.bushmills.com; £4.50) come with the delicious promise of a “tutored
nosing”. And you won’t want to miss a scrabble across the Giant’s Causeway
(open all year; 028 2073 1582).
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