Ilfracombe

Damien Hirst's Verity — a twenty-metre pregnant bronze — guards the harbour entrance, and behind her Victorian tunnels cut through the cliff to hidden bathing beaches. Ilfracombe is a Victorian seaside resort that refuses to fade, reinventing itself with contemporary art around a harbour that still smells of diesel and salt.

The Tunnels Beaches were hand-carved through the slate by Welsh miners in the 1820s, opening onto a tidal swimming pool and sheltered coves the high tide reclaims twice a day. Verity, installed in 2012, stands on the pier with one side classical and one side anatomically dissected — dividing the town and the tourists exactly as intended. The harbour keeps its crabbers and charter boats working, with the Lundy Island ship sailing from the quay in season, and the fourteenth-century chapel of St Nicholas on Lantern Hill above has guided vessels in for six centuries — among the oldest working lighthouses in the country. Seafood kitchens now cook the day's catch metres from the landing, while the older layer of chip shops, arcades and seaside pubs endures happily alongside, and the coast path toward Lee Bay drops through dense woodland to coves only low tide unlocks.