Devon with Kids: The Ultimate Family Holiday Guide

Here is a confession that will surprise no one who has actually done it: Devon is a genuinely brilliant place to take children, and yet it is also, quietly, one of the better places to take adults who would rather not think about children at all. That contradiction is the whole point. This is a county that has been doing family holidays since before the concept existed – before the inflatable ring, before the factor fifty, before anyone thought to put a slide in a pub garden – and it has got rather good at making everyone happy simultaneously. The beaches are real. The countryside is real. The cream teas are extremely real. What Devon offers families with discerning taste is not a theme park approximation of a holiday but the thing itself: long days with salt in your hair, excellent food within reach, and enough space that you can actually hear yourself think. Occasionally.

Why Devon Works So Well for Families

The structural advantages of Devon as a family destination are worth examining properly rather than simply taking on faith. The county splits neatly into two coastlines – the rugged, surfer-friendly Atlantic edge of North Devon and the gentler, rock-pool-studded coves of the South Devon coast – which means that whatever your children’s age or temperament, there is a version of the beach that works for them. The landscape behind those coastlines is Dartmoor: one of the last genuinely wild upland places in southern England, where you can walk for an hour without meeting another soul, which either sounds like bliss or a mild threat, depending on the age of your children.

Devon also has the great advantage of being large enough to absorb visitors without feeling overrun, and yet compact enough that you are rarely more than thirty minutes from something worth doing. That matters enormously when you are travelling with small people who have a different relationship with car journeys than adults do. The food scene has improved dramatically in recent years – proper restaurants, artisan producers, farm shops that would embarrass most city delis – which means the adults are not condemned to fish and chips every night. Not that there is anything wrong with fish and chips. Done properly in Devon, it is close to a religious experience.

For a broader orientation to everything the county offers, the Devon Travel Guide is the place to start before you begin planning in earnest.

The Beaches: Choosing the Right One for Your Family

Devon has somewhere in the region of two hundred miles of coastline, which is either very helpful or completely overwhelming, depending on how you approach it. The sensible move is to match the beach to your children rather than simply heading for the nearest one and hoping for the best.

On the South Devon coast, the beaches around Salcombe and the South Hams are the ones that convert people. Bantham is a wide, sandy sweep with excellent surf and a café behind the dunes that feels like it has been there since the fifties – because it largely has. Blackpool Sands, despite its name having nothing whatsoever to do with the Blackpool in Lancashire, is a privately managed crescent of sand backed by trees, with clean water and the kind of beach café that serves things you actually want to eat. For younger children, the rock pools at Wembury Beach are extraordinary – the whole foreshore is a Marine Conservation Area, and on a low tide you can find things that will genuinely astonish an eight-year-old.

North Devon plays a different game entirely. Croyde and Saunton Sands are surf beaches proper, and the local surf schools are well-run and genuinely suitable for children from around eight upwards. Older teenagers, in particular, take to surfing with an enthusiasm they rarely show for anything parents suggest, which is something of a minor miracle worth exploiting. Westward Ho! is flatter and safer for very young children, and the long beach at Instow, looking across the Taw-Torridge estuary, is the kind of place where small children can run for what feels like an unreasonable distance without encountering a wave of any consequence.

Activities and Attractions Worth the Detour

The question with any good family destination is not whether there are activities but whether the activities are any good. Devon clears that bar comfortably. Dartmoor alone offers a full programme: wild swimming in the rivers around Dartmeet, guided pony trekking through moorland that looks like it was designed for exactly this purpose, letterboxing (the original, pre-digital version of geocaching, which has been happening on Dartmoor since 1854 and requires nothing more than a map and a rubber stamp), and the kind of circular walks that end at a pub with a fire.

River Dart Country Park near Ashburton is genuinely excellent for younger children – adventure playgrounds, river swimming, kayaking and camping, all within a single estate. The Dartmouth Steam Railway runs along a stretch of the South Devon coast that makes adults feel briefly nostalgic for a past they probably did not experience, and makes children feel like they are inside a film. Older children with an interest in history will find the area around Dartmouth and Totnes surprisingly rich – Dartmouth Castle, the Mayflower connections at Plymouth, the strange and ancient atmosphere of Totnes itself, which operates on its own slightly alternative frequency.

For wildlife, the Sealife Centre at Weymouth is close enough for a day trip, but the honest answer is that the wildlife on the coast itself – grey seals, basking sharks in summer, puffins in the right season – is more memorable than anything in a tank. A wildlife boat trip from Salcombe or Dartmouth can be one of those unexpectedly transformative hours that children talk about years later. You simply cannot predict which experiences will stick.

Eating Well with Children in Devon

The good news for families travelling with any level of culinary expectation is that Devon has, over the last decade, become a serious food destination – not in the way that requires advance booking six weeks out and a willingness to eat things described using the word “foam”, but in the more satisfying sense of excellent local produce prepared by people who understand it.

The county’s farm shops are worth knowing about. Shillingford Organics near Exeter and Riverford Farm (which operates out of the South Hams) are the kinds of places where you can fill a boot with things that will make self-catering feel like a pleasure rather than a logistical exercise. For eating out, the coast road through South Devon is dotted with seafood restaurants and harbourside fish shacks that manage the trick of being genuinely good while remaining relaxed enough that no one looks at your children with barely concealed alarm.

Dartmouth has several restaurants that work well for families with older children – the town’s food scene punches considerably above its size. The Oyster Shack near Bigbury-on-Sea is an institution, and an unpretentious one, serving local oysters and seafood in a setting that is more barn than restaurant, which turns out to suit children rather well. In Exeter, the independent restaurant scene around the Quayside has expanded considerably and now offers enough variety that even the most opinionated twelve-year-old can find something they are prepared to eat. Which, if you have an opinionated twelve-year-old, you will know is not to be taken for granted.

Practical Tips by Age Group

The experience of Devon with a two-year-old and the experience of Devon with a fourteen-year-old share almost no common features, which is worth acknowledging before you plan anything.

Toddlers and young children (under 5): The South Devon coast is kinder here – shallower, calmer, less exposed. The beaches at Blackpool Sands and Instow are manageable for small children without the anxiety of Atlantic surf. Dartmoor, counterintuitively, works well for this age group on shorter walks – the landscape is dramatic enough to hold attention and the terrain is not especially technical. Bring waterproofs regardless of the forecast. This is England.

Primary age children (5 to 12): This is, objectively, the sweet spot for Devon. Children in this range are old enough for kayaking, rock pooling, surf lessons and moorland walks, and young enough to find all of it genuinely exciting rather than something to be endured. The steam railway, the adventure parks, Dartmoor letterboxing – this is the demographic these experiences were designed for. Pack a bag with snacks, a change of clothes, and lower expectations about how much of the plan will survive contact with reality.

Teenagers: The key is giving them something to be properly good at, and Devon obliges. Surfing at Croyde, coasteering with one of the South Devon adventure companies, kayaking on the Dart – these are the activities that convert teenagers from grudging participants into enthusiasts. Totnes appeals to teenagers with a slightly independent streak. Exeter has independent shops, decent food, and enough going on that older teenagers can be given some latitude to explore alone. Teens also, in the author’s experience, respond unexpectedly well to wild swimming, particularly if it is their idea.

Why a Private Villa with a Pool Changes Everything

There is a version of the Devon family holiday that involves a cottage with a damp ground floor, a shower that delivers water at one of two temperatures (cold or scalding), and a booking that requires you to be out by ten on the last morning when your children are still asleep and you have a four-hour drive ahead of you. Many people have this holiday. They tell themselves it builds character. It does not build character.

A private villa with a pool is not simply the same holiday with better bathrooms. It is a structurally different experience, and the difference is felt most acutely when you have children. The pool means that at any point in the day – morning, afternoon, the strange hour before dinner – there is something absorbing for the children to do that requires no organisation from you. This is not a small thing. This is, in fact, the thing. Parents of young children will recognise immediately what it means to have a space where the children are happily occupied and you are, temporarily, not the entertainment.

Private villas also allow families to eat together properly – a real table, a real kitchen stocked with local produce, meals at a time that suits you rather than the restaurant. You are not negotiating with a menu that has three items a child will eat. You are not rushing to finish before the second sitting. You are not, crucially, watching another table’s family enjoy themselves while yours disintegrates in slow motion.

Devon’s private villas – particularly those across the South Hams and the North Devon coast – tend to have serious outdoor space: gardens, terraces, direct access to countryside or coast. That physical room to spread out changes the energy of a family holiday in ways that are hard to articulate until you have experienced the alternative. Everyone gets a boundary. Everyone has somewhere to retreat to. The holiday, as a result, has a better chance of being what you hoped it would be when you booked it four months ago in a moment of optimism.

Space, privacy, a pool and a well-equipped kitchen: these are not luxuries in the brochure sense. For a family, they are the practical foundations of a holiday that actually works.

Browse our curated selection of family luxury villas in Devon to find the right base for your family this year.