20/07/2024
We’re very happy to be situated in the middle of the best beach in the UK 🥳. Heck of a spot.
“If all you’ve seen from the highway to Hayle is an industrial estate and the dormitory town serving St Ives over the bay, you’re missing the biggest secret on the Cornish coast. North of a port that makes little concession to tourism are the Towans, a 1,700-acre expanse of dunes where they once made the dynamite for the Cornish mining industry.
Beyond the dunes lies Cornwall’s most magnificent beach: beginning on the east bank of the Hayle estuary and running for three golden miles north to Godrevy Head. It’s so vast that geographers have split it into six more manageable sections named, from left to right, Hayle, Riviere, Gwithian, Mexico (an explanation follows), Upton and Godrevy Towans, but since they’re all beautiful I’m ignoring the boundaries and naming the entire stretch the Times and Sunday Times beach of the year 2024.
This spring, my Jack Russell and I spent 48 days touring the UK, travelling 5,583 miles, to assess the beaches of the south, east, north and southwest English coasts, as well as those in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
The Towans’ water quality is rated as excellent, it’s dog-friendly and the cleanliness, car parking, lifeguarding, catering and toilets are top notch. The water sports facilities are superb and the beauty is beyond question. The only snag is the lack of wheelchair access, and that’s something that must be remedied.
But there’s something here that’s not on the checklist: a sense of space in untamed nature that lowers your heart rate, reduces the cortisol and loosens the limbs.
Compared with Carbis across the bay, Fistral in Newquay or New Polzeath near Padstow, the Towans are rarely crowded — and that’s due to those dunes. Protected as a site of special scientific interest — one-fifth of Cornwall’s plant species grow here — they’re a buffer zone that has prevented the overdevelopment that has blighted other parts of the coast.”
