Chris picks his best...

Rooms with sea views | Food and drink spots | Beaches

Follow Chris in our camper van man travel special

The last week of The Sunday Times’s search for Britain’s best beach is a journey of surprises, with more ups and downs than a seaside rollercoaster.

Multimedia

• Camper van man Week 6 gallery: Salcombe to Whitstable

Multimedia

• Camper van man Week 5 gallery: Weston-super-Mare to Salcombe

Multimedia

Multimedia

• Camper van man Week 3 gallery: John O'Groats - Southport

Multimedia

• Camper van man Week 2 gallery: Skegness to John O'Groats

Multimedia

• Camper van man Week 1 gallery: Southend to Skegness

Beach of the week

Chris selects his favourite beaches from his camper van man tour of the British coast

Catch of the day

Chris selects his best food and drink tips from his camper van man tour of the British coast

Rooms with sea views

Chris selects his favourite places to stay on his camper van man tour of the British Coast

• Beach of the week

Camper van man week 2: Skegness to John O'Groats

On his round-Britain coastal adventure, Chris Haslam takes in England’s windswept northeast flank, then heads for Scotland

• Camper van man week 1: Southend to Skegness

• Camper van man's tour of the British coast

Related Links

• Camper van man: my British coast highlights

We had low expectations for the final 350-mile stretch from the mouth of Devon’s River Exe to the Kentish shoreline - the dramatic splendour of the West was always going to be a hard act to follow - but, as the Mystery Machine rolls into pretty Exmouth, the family falls silent, like sceptical diners stumbling across a truffle in their gruel.

After knocking up a quick castle on the splendid two-mile beach, we drift onto the lovely Esplanade, where the low-key attractions - crazy golf, miniature railway, adventure playground - could amuse the kids for hours. But time is pressing.

So, on to Budleigh Salterton, who I always thought was a troubled yet brilliant jazz trumpeter, but turns out to be Aldeburgh’s twin sister, right down to the steep shingle beach, the smacks, the loitering watercolourists and the art galleries. Finding an exhibition of Kandinsky’s woodcuts in the excellent Brook Gallery (01395 443003, www.brookgallery.co.uk ) is an unexpected delight.

Just over the hill lies Sidmouth, a Regency resort with a curiously Alpine air - steep hills clad in meadow and woodland fall sharply to a rough shingle beach - and clearly home to a powerful muse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived here, Betjeman wrote about it and, in August, it hosts an annual Folk Week - a kind of Glastonbury for people with longer beards.

In our first pass along the normally sedate seafront, we spy three clowns, half a dozen milkmaids and the Jolly Green Giant. Among them, wearing windcheaters and baseball caps, and frantically cross-referencing their guidebooks, stand a quartet of bemused American tourists.

Beer boasts the busiest beach I’ve seen in six weeks - a hectic jumble of hauled-out trawlers, motorised dories for hire, beach huts and row upon row of old-fashioned deckchairs laid out in defiance of the drizzle, all jostling for space on a pebble beach at the foot of what, in sunshine, would be dazzling white cliffs. The only thing missing is beach users, but it’s a different story, early next morning, in cloud-boundCharmouth.

You’d never sunbathe or swim here. The crumbling cliffs look as trustworthy as a Moroccan taxi driver, and the blood-red sea looks as if it has anger issues. No, you come to Charmouth to find fossils in the landslips that litter the shingle - and it’s not difficult.

As Mrs H wanders off to the fossil shop, I take the children rummaging, and in just two muddy hours, we’ve found the faint impression of an ancient seashell, two partial ammonites the size of 5p pieces and what might be a shark’s tooth. Mrs H is unimpressed. “They’ve got ammonites 10 times the size of yours in the shop,” she says. Ah, yes, we reply, but at what ludicrous prices? “Fifty pence,” she shrugs.

Times recommends

• Travel advice: what to do if your flight is disrupted
• Top 10 unmissable events in 2010
• Seven spa breaks for January