Wild Atlantic facing north coast bay
Web: www.thisisnorthcornwall.com/widemouth-bay.html
Web: www.visitcornwall.com/things-to-do/beaches/widemouth-bay-beach
Widemouth Bay is a bay, beach and small village on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall. It is about three miles south of Bude. This stretch of coast is steeped in the smuggling history of times before, and not far south of Widemouth Bay can be found many little inlets and coves.
Shipwrecks were very much a part of life on this coast for hundreds of years. And one man called John Bray left an astonishing record from the 18th century of some of the wrecks at Widemouth, documented in a series of letters to the famous Parson Hawker of Morwenstow.
The village of Widemouth Bay itself is a much more recent development, consisting mainly of bungalows built during the twentieth century. As well as a number of hotels, there are several cafes on and around the beach as well as a pub and shops on the hill above the bay. Widemouth Bay has a small church, Our Lady and St. Anne's, located on the landward side of the village.
The beach is popular for surfing and swimming and is patrolled in the summer by RNLI lifeguards. Several surfing schools operate on the beach because it has relatively gentle, easy to ride waves but on the other hand there can be big waves.
Widemouth Bay is visually very similar to Southerndown and Ogmore-by-Sea across the Bristol Channel in Wales; it has the same (gently sloping) hill-top location; wide, sandy beach; pounding Atlantic surf; and significantly the same carboniferous sandstone cliffs. Another significant connection is that sloops from Wales would use Widemouth as a port (in the most basic sense), unloading coal and limestone; sloops would take back to Wales Cornish wares such as granite, slate, tin, copper and even Cornish pasties.
The gentle beaches in the bay are also the landing points for many submarine cables that link the UK with other parts of the world. The proximity to GCHQ Bude installation allows data sent on these cables to be intercepted by GCHQ.
Bude Crackington Haven The Coastal Footpath Cornwall's Beaches