Beer is a very pretty little fishing village (taken over more by tourism now, as usual) on the south Devon coast. Disappointingly the name comes from an old English word for woodland and not from a rather enjoyable beverage but don’t let that stop you visiting. Part of Beer has even been into orbit. In 2007 some of the rocks from the cliffs were taken to the International Space Station and stuck to the outside of it to see how long the bacteria in them would survive. It turns out they lived for 553 days, which is a record.

We’d tried to paddle at Beer during the summer but it’s such a popular spot we couldn’t find anywhere to park. Funnily enough this wasn’t such an issue on a freezing cold December day: New Year’s Eve, in fact. You can see from the photos that we were not blessed with a crisply sunny winter’s day. However we are determined (if a little slow) in our cause and quite literally took our lives not to say our dignity in our hands to paddle here. The slope into the water was very steep and the waves were coming up high with the result that the depth went from toe dipping to drowning in about a metre. We managed but didn’t hang around long before retiring to a nice little cafe for coffee and scones.

See the photos here.

See Beer on a map.