Devon draws families with its magnificent beaches, Dartmoor, Exmoor, craggy coves and splendid cream teas. Cornwall, too, boasts the finest of coastlines – with 300 miles of dunes and cliffs – a proud artistic heritage and pasties that inspire great devotion.
Which is the right destination for your family?
Are you more of a Jurassic Coast aficionado? Or do you prefer a bit of Minack-shaped theatre by your sea? You may want to consider our lists of the best family activities in Devon and Cornwall.
But, ultimately, it’s a question of personality. Below, our family travel experts make the case for each.
By William Gray
What treachery! What barefaced betrayal! How could I possibly take sides with Cornwall after a childhood blissfully steeped in Devon family holidays? My parents will be incredulous. I can picture them now, snug in their East Devon cottage, reading this and shaking their heads. Traitor! Believe me, it’s not that I don’t love Devon. It’s just that I love Cornwall more.
From nappy-bound paddling at Praa Sands to teenage surfing in St Ives, our twins, now 15, have passed many of the essential rites of childhood on our holidays in Cornwall. They’ve caught crabs off the harbour wall in Mevagissey, paddled kayaks through Fowey’s labyrinth of creeks and dunked doughnuts in hot chocolate after a day’s bodyboarding at Trebarwith. They’ve fallen under the spell of jewel-like rockpools at Nanjizal, conquered granite tors on Bodmin Moor and held back the tide with sandy walls at Kynance Cove.
But you can do all that in Devon, I hear you cry. Well, yes, but somehow it just seems more exciting to do it in Cornwall. I guess that’s largely because Cornwall is more far-flung. For all its crawling traffic and toilet stops, I relish that epic drive to the road’s end, tracing the A30 until it fizzles out in the remote, romantic “island” of the Penwith peninsula. It feels like a proper journey. Cornwall stirs your wanderlust; Devon is just a nice place to visit.
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And you have to admit that Cornwall wins hands-down when it comes to beaches. Take Devon’s best surf offering – Woolacombe Sands – and I could rattle off 10 Cornish beaches (Gwithian, Whitesand, Polzeath, Porthmeor, etc) that would leave it floundering. Rockpools? Again, no contest. Cornwall’s coast has a certain zing; a wild exuberance that makes you want to rip your shoes off and sprint barefoot through the shallows.
The weather is always better in Cornwall, too. When rain sweeps in from the Atlantic, Cornwall often emerges in sunshine while clouds get snagged over soggy Devon. It’s also far easier to chase the sun in Cornwall. If sea fog descends on the north coast, you often just need to nip over to the Lizard to find blue skies. Try doing that in Devon with the big lump of Dartmoor in the way.
Cornwall also excels when it comes to places to stay. We’ve camped on clifftops with ocean views and rented cottages near deserted coves. We’ve stayed in stylish self-catering lodges like Gwel an Mor and top family hotels like the Polurrian and Watergate Bay.
Admittedly, Devon has the edge on world heritage sites (Jurassic Coast over Cornish Mining), but Cornwall’s top attractions are decidedly A-List (Eden Project, Minack Theatre, Tate St Ives, St Michael’s Mount and Tintagel Castle) compared to Devon’s C-List of Clovelly, Diggerland and The Big Sheep.
Put simply, Cornwall is special. It gets hold of you in a big sandy hug and won’t let go. Mum and Dad, we’d still love to come and see you in Devon this summer though.
William Gray is the author of Cornwall with Kids (Footprint, 2014)
Why Devon is better than Cornwall
By Ben Hatch
If it ever came to a brutal fight between Devon and Cornwall to decide which of them was the top family destination in Britain, and they weren’t allowed to use pitchforks, shivs or hurl large slabs of Suzy Sweet Tooth fudge at each other across the Tamar, which would win, I hear you ask.
OK. Cornwall first. The name Hatch is Celt, so I feel a brotherhood here, and particularly enjoy annoying my wife by referring to all Cornish people as “we” and anything in the county as “our”, as in: “Have you tried our cream teas?”
With those wonderful Poldark vistas, its vast sandy beaches make it a surfing and sailing mecca for holidaying poshos nipping down for the weekend in their Seasalt jackets in the hope of bumping into, then coolly ignoring, Prince Harry eating turbot at a Rick Stein eatery.
There are more Arthurian legends here than you shake a crabbing net at, and Cornwall also has an endearing independent streak, manifested primarily when the county irrelevantly votes Lib Dem and gets cross when it’s suggested its pasties aren’t crimped well enough.
Cornwall also has the Eden Project, which is full of hipster dads explaining to their offspring “through play” the importance of the Amazon rainforest. Though it should be noted that some of the attraction’s tropical biomes are so humid that your children are liable to emerge from behind a banana tree like feral animals suddenly totally naked, and complaining: “I was itchy and hot and I want to run about like this”, having thrown their clothes in a river.
Also, Cornwall attracts perhaps a few too many of the right-on brigade, who are liable to panic – as they flick through The Green Food Bible – as if you’ve just detonated a cluster when you accidentally drop a packet of Walkers cheese-and-onion.
What, then, of Devon? Warm enough for palm trees, it has more thatched cottages than anywhere in the world, making it so beautiful I almost want to wrap it in greaseproof paper, sprinkle sugar on it, and see what it’d taste like with almond shavings. It’s also home to the Sidmouth Donkey Sanctuary, which contains the greatest concentration of donkeys anywhere in the world.
Devon has the country’s best aquarium, in Plymouth, and, of course, Torquay is where Britain’s finest sitcom, Fawlty Towers, was based. In addition there’s Exmoor and Dartmoor, and Jacob’s Ladder beach, also in Sidmouth, which is surely a contender for the world’s most beautiful stretch of sand. Here you can rockpool and there’s sand cricket when the tide’s out. It even has a hill behind to fly kites on. And, what’s more, my aunt lives there and will, when I leave her, still curl my fingers round a precious 50p piec. Source from http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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