Beaches

They are expensive to maintain, plagued by tourists and influences seeking picture-postcard holiday snaps and cost more per square foot than houses in some of London’s most affluent neighbourhoods – despite lacking basic amenities such as running water. And yet such is the allure of the traditional seaside beach hut that, amid an otherwise shaky housing market, prices for these modest timber shacks just keep rising.  According to research by Moverly, which provides digital home information packs, the average asking price of a beach hut in England stands at £49,290 – up 43 per cent in the past year. In Dorset prices are up 101 per cent to more than £120,000.

When Thailand's tourist board mistakenly used a photo of West Beach on the Isle of Berneray in Scotland to promote the tropical paradise of Kai Bae Beach, it took a British expat with a keen eye to spot the error.  But perhaps the confusion shouldn't come as a surprise. With ivory dunes tumbling down to turquoise waters and the occasional chatter of a faraway pod of dolphins, the beaches of Uist, a collection of islands in the Outer Hebrides, could easily be mistaken for some of the most popular bays in the Seychelles or Caribbean. The only giveaways are the brisk breeze that nips your ears and the dearth of other visitors. The beaches here are regularly voted some of the most beautiful in the world.

‘Ah,’ says my husband at the top of the cliff path at Overstrand, ‘it’s just like a Shirley Hughes illustration.’ There are sandcastles, wooden groynes, children and dogs running in and out of the waves. Then his eye falls on the first land grab of the day. Three generations of the same family are hard at work constructing their citadel: popping up polyester tents to form a wide arc, shovelling shingle into the flaps to secure them, unfurling windbreaks across either end to mark the outer limits of their encampment. We – like the family in a favourite Hughes picture book from my childhood, Lucy and Tom at the Seaside (1976) – have travelled with just ‘the picnic things and bathing bags and buckets and spades’.

It’s a nail-biting cliff-edge ride down switchback, stomach-churning, hairpin bends. When you finally reach sea level, the Atlantic wind may be so strong and the rain so sharp that you can barely stand on the crescent of sandy shore. The distant islands of Clew Bay — 365 of them to match the days in the year — are nothing more than blistery shapes in the sea mist and wave spray. Yet this nerve-wracking mountainous route is a journey worth making. Despite — or maybe because of — being far from the madding crowd on Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland, Mayo’s Keem Bay has been voted one of the top 12 beaches in the world, beating contenders in Fiji, Hawaii and Bermuda.