The Somerset seaside town of Weston-super-Mare just outside the height of the summer season ticks our boxes for places we like to visit in the UK. Or it did, since we’ve mostly stopped travelling around the UK in more recent years thanks to a complete lack of value for money when the cost of living (i.e. the cost of supporting billionaires and tech bros and political donors) is so high.
Back in 2013 we headed to this spot on the west coast of England to use it as a base for exploring the surrounding area. A seaside location that we could come back to at the end of each day and enjoy some sea air walks, perhaps some tacky pier-end entertainments, and a pub or two absolutely suited the way we liked to have breaks.
We booked into the Beachlands Hotel at the time, it being close enough to walk into the main part of the town but not right in the middle of it, and having car parking too. The bonus was a swimming pool that we enjoyed using. One of our fondest memories of this hotel, though, was splashing out on an evening meal there one night and being seated outside the dining room ahead of our table being ready then being offered canapés. The canapés were thick slices of cucumber with a dollop of cream cheese on the top and they amused us immensely. We often talk about them now.
Anyway, after our drive up from Portsmouth and checking in, unpacking, and freshening up, we went for a walk down to Weston-super-Mare seafront and if it’s photographic evidence of this you’re after then you’ve come to the right place.
The beach at Weston-super-Mare has a lot of sand but depending on the time of day that you visit not much in the way of water. The bits that sort of look like water in the photos here are generally just wet sand reflecting the light from the sky. Weston-super-Mare actually has the second largest tidal range in the world with the difference between low and high tides over one and a half kilometres.
On a later visit to this part of the world in 2017 we would actually see the sea during another walk along Weston-super-Mare seafront.
The “Super Mare” part of the town’s name comes from Latin but it’s not “extraordinary lady horse” if that’s what you’re thinking while I’ve conveniently placed this paragraph just above photos of some equine animals on the beach. These are donkeys, silly, and while I’m not a fan of having working animals and would certainly never ride one they did seem to be looked after fairly well and were in decent spirits as far as my reading of donkey facial expressions go. “Super Mare” means “on the sea” and suggests that the town was named at high tide otherwise the commonly-used term of “Western-super-Mud” might have come into use a lot earlier instead.
We reached the Grand Pier and we felt compelled to walk down and around it. Should you ever need to slow us down if we’re pursuing you then you could do a lot worse than construct a few piers in our way and we’ll be sure to check them out.
The pavilion on the pier in the photo below is the third such one as it won’t surprise you to learn that since its original construction in 1904 there have been a few fires that have required substantial repairs. Our travelling experiences and visits to historical buildings suggest piers almost love catching fire as much as churches do.
We don’t talk about the kinky hot dog figure on Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier.
That brought our walk along the seafront at Weston-super-Mare to an end for this first night of our 2013 visit to the West Country. All that remained was to wander into town and find a pub or two to drink in. With this being pre-2016 there’s a good chance this would have been a Wetherspoons pub. We, like all good and decent people, don’t frequent their small-minded establishments any longer.
