England holidays tips

As a child I can remember trying to swim out to a wrecked fishing boat off the beach at Camber Sands on the Sussex/Kent border. I stared at the horizon until the whole universe felt blue. It felt like the most exotic place on Earth. The south-east coast clearly made an impression, as I later settled in Kent and I am raising my own family here.

The amber, auburn and crimson colours of autumn cosy up on top of one another, each layer dotted with patches of green, waving gently in the wind. This description is not one of the Lake District landscape before me, though it does match those views. Rather, it’s of the cabbage and butternut squash sabzi that’s just been handed to me by Harrison Ward on the summit of Black Fell – cooked on a camping stove with red onion, diced garlic and ginger, ½ teaspoon nutmeg, ½ teaspoon turmeric, accompanied by a freshly made flatbread and topped with coriander.

I hadn’t planned my walk along the Sankey Canal to coincide with the axing of HS2 but it happened like that. It was a sunny day. I had been promising myself a hike along the towpath for ages. I grew up in the area and it holds a special place in my affections. As I wandered it struck me that this under-explored waterway was arguably the UK’s first significant development in infrastructure since the Romans built roads. It was built in two years.

“Look,” said Liam Herringshaw, pointing at a melon-sized bulge in the layers of rock fronting the prom in Scarborough. “There’s where a five-toed dinosaur walked 160 million years ago.”

There are some cafés with such great names, you just have to eat there. So, in spite of grey, drizzly skies and a stiff breeze, we head to Goat Ledge in St Leonards – set on the seafront with tables on the shingle – for breakfast. One of the town’s new breed of hip cafés and eateries, Goat Ledge is a brightly painted beach shack, with bookable huts for dinners of freshly caught fish or crab-loaded fries, and lip-smacking breakfast baps, washed down with Coldblow coffee, hand-roasted just over the border in Kent.

This two-hour train trip gets seriously scenic after Coleraine, when it partly follows the coast and Lough Foyle. As it runs along Downhill Beach, the sands and turbulent ocean are just outside the window, with the domed Mussenden temple perched on the cliffs above. On through farmland and past views of craggy Binevenagh – a towering cliff on the edge of the Antrim plateau – it will offer views of wintering geese, whooper swans and waders on the shores of the lough.

Cookham, a Thames-side village in Berkshire, was described as “a village in heaven” by the artist Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), who lived there most of his life. He is best known for his paintings of biblical events transposed to Cookham’s streets, gardens and riverbanks. Today the village houses the Stanley Spencer Gallery, a converted Methodist chapel run entirely by volunteers. The gallery opened in 1962 and was refurbished in 2007, with a mezzanine floor added to show more of the 100-odd works in the collection. Two exhibitions are staged every year. The summer show, A Brush with History: Stanley Spencer and Modern British Art, runs until 5 November. The winter exhibition, Everywhere is Heaven: Stanley Spencer and Robert Wagner, begins on 9 November and is the gallery’s first collaboration with a living artist. As well as paintings and drawings, the museum contains memorabilia such as Spencer’s pram, which the eccentric artist used to push his canvas and easel around the village – wearing his pyjamas under his suit if it was cold.£7 adults/£3.50 age 18-25/under-18s free, daily until 5 November, Thursday to Sunday only from 9 November to 24 March

Many visitors come to Liverpool for its football or music heritage. But away from those obvious attractions, it has exciting food and drink, unique cultural institutions and a dynamic nightlife and live music scene that stays true to the city’s legacy.

Hadrian’s Wall has perhaps the most single-minded personality of all the National Trails, tracing as it does the 84 miles from Bowness-on-Solway to Wallsend, which represented the north-west frontier of the Roman empire for nearly 300 years. It was built by the Roman army (the soldiers dug the ditches, quarried the stones and laid them) on the orders of the emperor Hadrian after his visit to Britain in AD 122.

Forget satnav, the best way to find your way around the wild granite uplands of Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor is to invest in an old-fashioned Ordnance Survey map. That’s exactly what writer Louis de Bernières did when he was exploring the setting for his new novel Light Over Liskeard, a “heartwarming” dystopian fantasy in which the hero (a quantum cryptographer called Q) seeks refuge and self-sufficiency in a remote moorland farmhouse while waiting for the collapse of civilisation.

Part of the vast 22,500-acre Elveden estate, owned by the Guinness family, this charming pub with rooms is surrounded by the Brecks, one of the most wildlife-rich areas in the UK, part of Thetford Forest. Stroll the forest tracks beneath blazing autumnal canopies, and look out for stone curlews, woodlarks and nightjars, roe and red deer, hares and muntjac. The High Lodge Forest Centre has play areas, cycle trails and a tree canopy adventure course – ideal if you’re visiting with the kids, with family rooms (sleeping up to four) available at the inn. Doubles from £105 B&B; elvedeninn.com

Tealby. Two syllables hinting at 1,600 years of history. The name of this little Lincolnshire wolds spot is thought to mean “village of the Taifali people”. Which is odd, as the east Germanic Taifali tribe hailed from the Carpathian mountains, far from the east Midlands.

Cold beers, crab sandwiches, glorious beaches and rugged headlands. Croyde Bay on the North Devon coast is well worth the trek to get there (a three-and-a-half-hour train journey from Paddington via Exeter to the nearest station at Barnstaple), if only to fall gratefully into the warm embrace of the village’s much-loved Thatch pub.

England’s Heritage Open Days run from 8 to 17 September encompassing more than 5,000 volunteer-run events, tours and openings, all of which are free. For this year’s festival, Sound Leisure, which has been manufacturing classic jukeboxes since 1978, will be offering tours of its Leeds factory and showroom, with the chance to meet the team who hand-build these retro wonders. 14 September, 10am, booking required

A line of London buses is crossing Salisbury Plain. It looks like someone has taken a red pen to the map. At the wheel of the leading bus is Peter Hendy, AKA Lord Hendy, AKA the boss of Network Rail. He’s a great man for old Routemasters, owns two, and is the driving force – literally – of this annual jaunt to the abandoned village of Imber.

In the dining room of the Wasdale Head Inn, explorer and climber Leo Houlding is inspecting the walls, looking back 150 years to the origins of mountain adventure as a sport. On a shelf is a stack of old hobnail boots, a pair of ice axes crossed above a brace of canvas haversacks, and glorious black-and-white photographs of the pioneers: the tweedy chaps who first came up with the nonsensical notion that scaling rock faces and mountains might be fun.

Alfred Wainwright’s coast-to-coast trail through Cumbria and North Yorkshire over mountains and moorland is one of the UK’s most popular long-distance walks, with an estimated 6,000 people completing the whole 197 miles each year, and lots more walking shorter sections. In August 2022 the government announced it would become England’s newest national trail. About the same time, the Borrowdale Royal Oak hotel in Rosthwaite, near Derwentwater and right on the route, reopened after a £1.3m refurbishment with a sustainable focus (and free cake).

I’ve spent my working life as bookseller, book marketer, publisher and now author, so it was probably inevitable that I would lean heavily on literature for my book Real Dorset. Luckily for me, writers have frequently turned to Dorset for their inspiration.

I’ve got a bit of a thing for my elders. As a kid I wouldn’t leave my great-aunt alone. In my early 30s, I went on six coach holidays with a load of strangers twice my age for my book, The Gran Tour. So it won’t come as a surprise to learn that I recently dragged my old man to Scarborough for a mini-break. When I say dragged, I’m only half-joking. He didn’t fancy the coach ride, for a start. For the first hour of the journey north from Portsmouth, Dad behaved like a hostage, but by the time we’d reached Reading he was leaning across the aisle to help a couple with the crossword.

If picturesque cycling, coastal walks and simple seaside pleasures float your boat, make the Isle of Wight your first port of call. Home to Queen Victoria’s summer retreat, Osborne House, the island has 20 beaches and a series of unspoilt coves. A network of cycle and walking trails covers 17 miles of coastline and countryside. Famous for the Cowes sailing regatta in July and August, the 147-square-mile island also offers every water sport going, from kayak surfing and windsurfing to paddle-boarding and parasailing.

It happened at an indoor wall for the sport of “bouldering”. I was standing watching some athletic young men conquer a tricky route that was beyond my abilities, half-listening to their banter, when I suddenly understood what they were discussing. A proposal to climb outdoors. They had never done it. They dreamed of it, but were uncertain how to go about it.