Why Croyde is riding the crest of a wave

04.10.2023 - 12:21 / theguardian.com

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.

We first discovered Croyde 10 years ago, looking for an alternative to Cornwall for an extended family holiday by the sea. Since then, we’ve never been anywhere else. The first glimpse as you round the headland never disappoints; wide, white-tipped rollers gliding in across the sands, the dramatic outline of Baggy Point stretching out towards Lundy Island on the other side of the bay, as beautiful in autumn as it is in high summer. Apart from a few houses, scattered along the side of the headland, the beach is unspoilt, saved by the line of dunes, designated as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).

Croyde hit the headlines earlier this year, when it became part of the UK’s first world surfing reserve: 19 miles of wave-lashed shoreline, with beaches to suit everyone from novice bodyboarders to hardcore local surfers, who flock to the beach in the autumn months, when the water is still warm and the waves at their most reliable. It came as a surprise to those who hold up Cornish beaches, such as Newquay and Polzeath, as the epicentre of the UK surfing scene – but then Croyde has always been a little more under the radar.

Every year, when we return, I worry the village will have changed, that some loophole will let the developers in. But part of the joy of Croyde is that it somehow always remains the same; the cupboard-sized Ralph’s Surf Shop is still there on the corner, the Hub still does the best lemon crunch ice-cream and it’s always impossible to walk past Saltrock without coming out with at least two T-shirts and a hoodie.

This year, our base for the week is the Old Cider Barn, two sumptuously converted barns with a raised garden area, tucked away off the road up to Georgeham. In the past, we’ve stayed in the residential roads nearer the beach, but there’s something lovely about being right in the heart of the village, and we soon grow used to walking along the high street in wetsuits and booties, before the 10-minute stroll through the fields and past the dunes to the beach.

The walk itself is lovely; entirely free of the sprawling holiday apartments and souvenir shops that flank so many of our coastal resorts. Instead, the path winds beneath trees just beginning to turn, a few houses visible through the burnt orange foliage, before the dunes rise up and the first glimpse of the sea appears between the sandy slopes. Even in the blustery conditions that