Ilfracombe

Ilfracombe is a Victorian seaside resort that never quite got the memo about the twentieth century, and is oddly better for it. The harbour is guarded by a sixty-six-foot bronze pregnant woman holding a sword, half her skin removed to show the anatomy underneath, which the town has broadly decided to be fine about. Everything worth reaching involves a hill, a tunnel hand-carved by Welsh miners, or both. It is not a pretty coastal town pretending it has nowhere to be. It genuinely has nowhere to be, and it stopped apologising for that decades ago.