Not that they’d welcome the comparison, but my two wannabe surf dudes reminded me of nothing so much as a Victorian painting. Crouched attentively on Porthcothan Beach in north Cornwall as Windy, the instructor from the Waves Surf School, traced diagrams in the sand to show the riptides, they brought irresistibly to mind Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh, in which the young hero and his brother (in ruffs and breeches rather than wetsuits) gen up on the lore of the sea from a gnarly sailor at the Budleigh Salterton shoreline.

Such scenes (the surfschool ones, not the hero’s boyhood) are enacted – wave conditions permitting – up and down the littoral as the West Country confirms its status as Britain’s surfers’ paradise. After the quick lesson on the sand, the neophytes join the bona fide surfers to gyre and gimble in the spume and try, try, try again until they’re riding the waves in the required manner. The Pit Surf Shop in St Merryn rents surfboards, bodyboards and wetsuits, delivered to your accommodation, if you no longer need the auspices of a surf school.

There are more surf shops in Newquay than on Bondi Beach, though the old-style holidaymakers are still in evidence. A pair of them watched a lad with sun-bleached hair ride his skateboard (land transit of choice for the surfer) down the main street in swaggering manner, until he crashed into a car and fell off. He got up and sheepishly limped off. “I hope he didn’t damage that car,” sniffed the lady to her companion.

Cornwall is a delightful mix of the traditional and some cool new experiences (fast becoming institutions themselves). Take food: you can dine magnificently on pasties from, inter alia, the Chough bakery in Padstow, or join the fast-moving queue for fish and chips at the wonderful chippie in St Merryn, where it’s strictly cash, no credit cards. Or you can flex the plastic – and make sure you book ahead – at Fifteen Cornwall, Jamie Oliver’s western outpost, where the six-course tasting menu costs £50. Make that £90 if you opt for the wine choice with each course.

Not cheap, but the attentive service, the fresh local ingredients discussed knowledgeably by the young staff and cooked with skill, imagination and a dash of Italian flair (what doesn’t grow locally is imported from Italy), plus the sweeping view of the kite-surfers of Watergate Bay soaring into the twilight, made it worth the money.

Still, it was not all about food – or surfing – as we struck out each day from our comfortable base in a four-berth Strathmore static caravan (en-suite loo in the master bedroom, plasma telly, even a fireplace), which overlooked a picture-perfect crescent of beach below Mother Ivey’s Bay Caravan Park at Trevose Head. A lot of the caravans among the neat flower beds and impeccable lawns are privately owned holiday homes, and the absence of any communal amenities, bar a well-stocked shop and a laundry room, made it feel more like being in a holiday cottage than a holiday camp (although you knew you were in a caravan when the rain beat on the roof).

One evening, the teenagers and I crossed the county to the Eden Project – now well established as a draw for every type of holidaymaker – to see Rufus Wainwright. The Eden Sessions on the open-air stage (last year’s included Lily Allen and the Pet Shop Boys, this year’s still to be announced) draw the young crowd, who can have a look round the amazing collection of plants in the temperate and tropical biomes and admire the stunning outdoor planting before the sun goes down and the show starts.

One week in a caravan holiday home at Mother Ivey’s Bay Caravan Park, for up to six people, £305-£895, 01841 520 990, www.motheriveysbay.com; Fifteen Cornwall, 01637 861 000, www.fifteencornwall.co.uk; Eden Project session tickets about £30, including day pass, 01726 811 900, www.edenproject.com; Waves Surf School, Padstow, 01841 521 230, www.wavessurfschool.co.uk, half-day lessons £30; Outdoor Adventure, Bude, 01288 362900, www.outdooradventure.co.uk, surf lessons from £25; the Pit Surf Shop, wetsuits and boards from £15 per week, 01841 520 204, www.surf-the-pit.co.uk

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