Salcombe

Salcombe is Devon's most expensive way of standing in a queue for a pasty. The town spent four hundred years building schooners fast enough to outrun the weather, and now the harbour is full of boats that outrun nothing and cost more than the cottages they moor beneath. The place still works, in the sense that the shellfish boats go out and the tide comes in and nobody in the sail loft turned it into a gallery until quite recently. It is genuinely, indefensibly beautiful, and it charges you for every second of the view like a meter running in a taxi that isn't going anywhere.