Taking a wheelchair on holiday to St Ives is like being in one of those naval field-gun teams racing over an obstacle course. What were they thinking when they built it? Had they never so much as glanced at the EU directives on accessibility?

Granted, it has a breathtaking position on the steep north shore of Cornwall, just to the west of a spectacular bay with obligatory sandy beach that lies back and lets huge waves expend their useless energy all over it, but still: when not telling Bertie to stand up so we could unwedge the chair from some narrow alley, we were staggering up a near-vertical hill or trying not to lose control coming down and release him at Mach 2.

The town is also a labyrinth. I lost sight of the wheelchair and its attendants for a second and faced six alternative narrow routes, all of which bifurcated further within yards. I gave up looking and perched on a wall to concentrate on getting grumpy.

If you have any taste, it is easy to get grumpy in St Ives. The fishing town was made famous by a bunch of artists in the 1930s, when the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her painter husband, Ben Nicholson, moved there.

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Others drifted down in their wake, from Henry Moore and Naum Gabo to Roger Hilton and Patrick Heron. Now, cashing in on the cachet, every other shop is a “gallery”, and there are more galleries than artists; a fact confirmed should you have the misfortune to look inside one. They are stuffed with the most appalling daubs.

We picked Cornwall for a break because we have three active, adventurous children. Indeed, they are so active and adventurous that the middle one, Bertie, 12, broke his ankle just before we set off. Undeterred, we packed a wheelchair and determined to make the best of it. So, obviously, Tate St Ives was high on our list of “things to do in Cornwall with a wheelchair”.

Overlooking Porthmeor Beach, this landmark building opened in 1993. As an outpost of a national museum, it has access to a vast art collection, but they had dug out some mediocre rubbish to stick up when we went. The third-rate British art easily lost on points to a nice building with amazing views out to the Atlantic Ocean cascading onto the beach. And has ever so much building been given over to so few paintings? There are four floors, yet only 1.5 contain galleries.

There’s a shop, a room with computer terminals and a cafe (St Ives’s three cafes per head, including one just outside on the beach, obviously not being enough), so that leaves five smallish spaces for art. Four of them had that mediocre stuff it would be invidious to name...

All right then: I do not see why Margo Maeckelberghe’s tedious landscapes deserve an entire room. Bernard Leach’s pottery is all very well (and local), but, honestly, it’s better on the kitchen table than in a glass display cabinet. And two rooms devoted to printmakers? Everybody knows that prints are what you buy when you can’t afford proper art.

By the time I encountered a Hepworth sculpture, it seemed surrounded by angels tootling away on heavenly trumpets, such was its impact, and I didn’t like Hepworth much before.

“Right, that’s it,” I cried. “We’re going to Hepworth’s house right this minute.”

“Won’t she mind?” said Freddie. “Oh, God,” moaned Bertie - not an art-lover - from the depths of his wheelchair.

“Unfortunately, Dame Barbara lived oblivious to health and safety directives, and burnt to death in 1975.”

Managed by the Tate, the sculptor’s house is an easy wheelchair hike from the main gallery.

“Is it suitable for a wheelchair?” I asked the young lady at the ticket desk.

“Can you come back tomorrow when I can get someone to unlock the side door?” she said.

“No, I’ve just driven 288 miles. Get someone out of the Tate cafe now,” I didn’t reply. Instead, I stuck my head out of the door and shouted at Bertie in the street.

“You’ll just have to sit there and stare at the wall for a bit.” He would have done the Bertie Wooster buck and wing dance but for his cast.

Hepworth’s house is worth driving 288 miles for on its own. The garden is stuffed with more art than the whole of the Tate down the road. Her presence is pervasive. A little summerhouse still has the now stiff-jointed garden chairs, dull with spotted rust, and the bed with candlewick spread where she liked to rest.

And all they’ve done to her workshop is empty the ashtrays. Chisels, sanders, mallets, hammers, string, brushes, lie dry and rusting, jumbled on the workbench and chairs. Plaster-spattered work clothes hang on the door. Old tins of Dulux and Peek Frean biscuits clutter shelves. Uncut stone, works in progress, partly polished marble globes, a calendar torn to the 20th (the day in May she died)...

Crassly, the only addition to her dust-laden working mess is a shiny new glistening-red fire extinguisher. What health and safety requirement does it serve in a room you can only look at through a window? Baffling.

Dame Barbara laid out the garden herself, positioning sculptures in evocative juxtaposition with plants and shrubs, and cramming in more than you might think feasible. In early spring, it was a sensual delight: the slow, self-involved curves and quiet patina of bronze played off against the fizzing green spikiness of a yucca. It was a shame Bertie was missing it all.

Then again, perhaps not. St Ives Bay in bright early spring, with the Atlantic all bristling blue and white-flecked waves crashing in, is a glorious sight, but if you’re 12 and stuck in a wheelchair, you couldn’t give a stuff.

Unfortunately, looking at views was pretty much his only option, so I thought we should hit Land’s End. Surely one of the most famous beauty spots on the planet? “Windswept, remote grandeur, next stop America. It’ll be great, Bertie.”

I was wrong. The first thing you encounter as you approach the famous spot is the “Land’s End and West Country Shopping Village”. Yes, overlooking the cliff edges is a shopping centre. What kind of moron comes to look at the majestic might of the Atlantic and thinks: “Oooh, I’ll buy a shirt”? It gets worse.

I could just about live with the plethora of signs along the edge saying “Dangerous cliffs”, as it is conceivable that an impulse shirt-buyer is unaware that a sheer 100ft drop onto sharp rocks and wild seas is less than safe, but a 30ft-high mural of the Tardis directing shirt-buyers to a Doctor Who exhibition is beyond a joke. Doesn’t the National Trust have an extremist paramilitary wing that can sort this nonsense out?

Dispirited, we went off for tea at Mullion Cove. I was apprehensive, having last been there as a small boy in 1973. It was nothing more than a small harbour, built by a landowner in the 19th century to help the local fishermen. Would it now have a pink-marble shopping mall and Simpsons theme park? No. Unlike Land’s End, Mullion Cove is unchanged: a tiny harbour around which the waves hurl themselves onto savage rocks, and anyone trying to get in under sail alone would have had to be insane.

Freddie and Matilda disappeared while Bertie patiently pretended to admire the view. After a while, I went to look for them. I used to be allowed to wander about here entirely on my own. Was everybody ludicrously irresponsible in the 1970s? I am retrospectively terrified for myself as the children bound along a slippery path halfway up the cliff face. There wasn’t a single sign to tell them that certain death would result if they plunged over the precipice.

The only commercial venture by the harbour is the Porthmellin Tea Rooms, an establishment so removed from our time that you expect the Famous Five to pop in for restorative ginger beer and cake. We stuck to tea and scones with requisite clotted cream. Excellent, though you might bear in mind that if you have lunched on whelks and pâté, clotted cream washed down with lemonade, followed by being vigorously whisked through twisty Cornish lanes, is a recipe for disaster for 12-year-olds. (Sorry, Bertie.)

The best bits of Cornwall are those such as Mullion Cove, the Lizard and Godrevy Point, where the National Trust runs things; as soon as commerce is allowed free rein, you end up with the Land’s End abomination.

Cornwall is still a brilliant place to go with children: abandoning Bertie and his mother, I took off with the other two for hikes over the West Penwith Environmentally Sensitive Area (also known as the B3306), followed the coastal path along Hellesveor Cliff and watched them freeze in the sea at Carbis Bay beach. I think we owe it to Bertie to take him back now he’s up and about.

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