SUNDAY afternoon at the seaside. Waves crash on the beach, children build sandcastles, families stroll along the prom licking ice-creams. Quintessentially English - except that most of the women are wearing saris, stalls are selling curried snacks and stray cows are grazing piles of rubbish. This is Gopalpur-on-Sea, an unlikely outpost of Britain's seaside empire.

The town's name on maps of India has always intrigued me. A fishing village developed last century as a sort of Weston-super-Mare for the Raj, it is tucked away in the eastern state of Orissa. In its holiday heyday, as

Jan Morris writes in Stones of Empire, its “27 authentic seaside boarding houses regretted that breakfast could not be served in bedrooms except in case of genuine sickness”.

Gopalpur, with its grand views of sunrise over the Bay of Bengal, is the final destination of the week my wife Clare and I are spending in Orissa, one of India's least-visited states. It rises to densely forested hills from coastal paddy fields fringed with palm trees and ponds of hyacinths. It feels remote, but has good transport connections with Calcutta and Madras and would suit visitors ready to move on from the Indian “starter pack” of Kerala and the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur Golden Triangle.

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Its fame rests on its temples. As our train from Calcutta pulls in at Bhubaneswar, the state capital, I read that the city has about 500 of them. This is not necessarily good news. Over 15 Indian trips, many long afternoons of padding across warm temple floors have left me “templed out”. So what a pleasant surprise Bhubaneswar's temples will turn out to be.

The city, with its broad avenues and plush hotels - notably the elegant Trident Hilton - has little of the hustle and bustle of a state capital. Its parks, gardens and languid cyclists give it the easygoing charm of small-town India. In two days, we see only three other Westerners.

We visit the State Museum, with its life-sized tableaux of many of the 62 tribes making up a quarter of Orissa's population. They are shown sifting grain, dancing and wrestling pythons. Each tribe is summed up by a caption. One points out that the Santal tribe “love tidiness”.

Across town, at the top of a drive lined with marigolds, is a separate Tribal Museum, whose displays of necklaces, anklets, waist-chains and toe-rings show artistic skills honed to any anatomical challenge.

Surprised to have Western visitors, one of the museum staff, Sadasiba Dash, takes us on a leisurely tour of re-created huts, pointing out trumpets made from bison horns, posts where the Kondh tribe sacrifice buffalo, and staring yellow faces painted on poles to ward off evil spirits.

From here, we visit the market, a place of unexpected calm and resplendent silk saris. We buy intricately woven baskets ... but it's no good, I'm going to have to face the temples sooner or later.

With 500 to go at, we settle for four, all small. We have most of them to ourselves and, with no would-be guides to distract, it's a delight to have the time and space to take in 1,000-year-old carvings of coquettish dancing girls, elephants snoozing under palm trees, monkeys de-nitting each other, and couples enjoying astonishingly athletic sex.

Forty miles (60km) down the road at Konark, it's a different story. Here is the great Sun Temple, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Designed like a war chariot, it attracts hordes of Indian coach parties. For all its stunning scale, however, its carvings are less well-preserved than those in Bhubaneswar and the experience is more diffuse, with hawkers selling plastic temple models and, enterprisingly, cucumbers (“Very cooling, sir”).

Along the coast, Puri is one of India's most sacred towns. Here the Jagannath temple, soaring over surrounding streets like a colossal chess piece, is closed to non-Hindus, who view it from a platform at the nearby Raghunandan Library.

The librarian, R.N. Das, leads us up a wooden staircase (“Beware - there may be monkeys”) to the platform. Below, the main street is a clamour of priests, pilgrims, beggars and touts: the whole Chaucerian panoply of pilgrimage with an Indian slant. At festivals, 700,000 people gather here. “In your country, not so many people?” Mr Das says. We shake our heads. “Oh, very lonely,” he says.

Puri has another side: as a holiday resort. The Brits once flocked here from Calcutta, staying at the South Eastern Railway Hotel, which now looks as long past its best as the hunting trophies still clinging to its walls.

These days, Bengali families throng the beach, clamber on to the fairground rides and nibble candyfloss. Flare-lit evenings are magical and, with a few more seagulls, it could be Brighton, though with deckchairs replaced by red plastic bucket chairs.

It seems a foretaste of Gopalpur-on-Sea. We drive down on a Sunday afternoon, overtaking bullock carts on National Highway 5, turn on to a quiet road and are full of anticipation as we reach the outskirts of town: scattered shops and tea stalls, tailors with whirring sewing machines and adverts for Vishnu Cement - “God's Own Concrete”.

It quickly transpires, however, that we're not in Gopalpur's outskirts, but in the town's centre. This may once have been an important trading port for Java and Sumatra, but it now seems a two-goat town. As such, of course, it's a perfect place to relax.

Raneshwar Rath, our hotel's helpful manager, takes us on an “orientation tour”. He points out the Roman Catholic church, the lighthouse and the prawn factory, the gutted Victorian school and the handful of decaying British bungalows, creepers straggling their verandas. Here is Brighton Villa, there Mary Villa. “British foreigners are staying here until 1947, until independence,” he says. “Nowadays not.”

We seem to have found the ultimate backwater. But we turn a corner on to the seafront, and the place explodes with life. The beach is packed with day-trippers. Picnicking families sit cross-legged on blankets; rows of chairs are lined up facing the sea, as though in a cinema; children pester their parents to buy cheap souvenirs made from sea-shells.

By sunset, the crowds will have gone home to nearby towns, leaving just thousands of footprints on the deserted beach, but for the moment it feels like a bank holiday.

Rashmi Sarangi, a young insurance consultant, has biked 20 miles here with his wife and friends. Why have they come, I ask. He smiles. “For merrymaking only,” he says.

Gopalpur-on-Sea: famed for its merrymaking.Cox & Kings (020-7873 5000, www. coxandkings.co.uk) offers a 15-night Darjeeling & the Eastern Himalaya private journey including Bhubaneswar, Puri and Konark, from £2,625pp, with BA flights. A three-night extension to Gopalpur-on- Sea costs from £200pp

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