ELLIE HARRISON

Crowd-free escapes are in high demand and your personal recommendations are valued currency

Crowd-free UK holidays will be the Holy Grail this year, making your personal recommendations valued currency.

It seemed easier to count the people who didn’t go to Cornwall this summer. If the UK had the foam geology of Fred’s weather map on This Morning, we’d have all been in the drink. By the return of school in September – mischievously labelled the holiday-time for ‘newlyweds and the nearly-deads’ – the hotspots were no less busy.

Wherever we filmed, from the Lake District to Devon to Kent, the country lanes and hotels heaved. Good news for brand Britain. Not good news for a relaxing summer beach experience.

On Polkerris beach where there was more towel than sand, I lost sight of my children in the crowds, and there was no concealing an inelegant bikini exit from the waves. That was until I made a discovery so glaring I was embarrassed to say it out loud, even though it should have been an order through a loudhailer: move away from the car park. It’s a natural place to germinate a crowd and I too drive everywhere, but by slinking away around the headland on paddleboards we discovered the promised land: empty beaches.

Across the country we tend to amass in the obvious places. On my patch in autumn, thousands of people queue in cars, park and then pay to see the changing leaf colour at Westonbirt Arboretum, driving past dozens of broadleaf woodlands on the way there. There is comfort in cafés, signposts and loos. But there are also crowds. Similarly, the Cotswold-coloured adventcalendar villages with a tarmac rectangle that’s yours for just £3.50 per hour, are a honeypot for visitors who overlook the Forest of Dean nearby. Godspeed the driverless car that drops us off and steers itself far away. But it isn’t just the magnetism of a car park that has us congregating like iron-filing art while other beautiful places are deserted.

THE HOLY GRAIL OF HOLIDAYS

Everyone has limited holiday time and budget so it makes sense to go to the destinations with a reputation. Understandably, nobody wants to risk hard-won time and money on the unknown. I strangely do. Not because I have casual disregard for cash – I’ll actually spend weeks online casting a wide net over boundless holiday flotsam until I finally pluck out the pirates’ treasure, whereas my boyfriend would Google the word ‘holiday’, promptly click the buy button and start tapping in credit card details. But because I hate to repeat any experience (good or bad), even restaurants, since there seem so many new things to try, each an unmatching jewel added to the miscellany of my headdress.

Another good reason for the congregation is simply not knowing what else is out there. Hidden lochs, secret valleys and panoramic views don’t come with a marketing budget. To write this piece, I glided over the map that pins the location where each of my photos have been taken and, even with the coverage of a decade’s worth of new field trips every week via Countryfile, I still couldn’t think of where to recommend a holiday. So, it’s personal recommendation that’s needed to comfort our bold spending. It turns out the best-known online source of trip recommendations has been mired by fake paid-for-reviews at one end and censorship at the other – a handy tool to be used shrewdly.

Authentic local knowledge is gold and it’s something we should offer up whenever we can. Because, although we tut when a TV show or newspaper reveals the secret gems of our home territories, we’d also be unhappy thinking a visitor who’d chosen to travel to see it missed out on experiencing the best our patch has to offer. Or at least left thinking we have bad taste.