TYPE the words “Soar Mill Cove” into an internet search engine and you’re likely to get around 28,000 hits – a remarkable amount, considering it’s a hidden gem, tucked away in south Devon.

I’m a Devon boy and I admit I’d never heard of the place until I stumbled across it on the National Trust’s website. Furthermore, it took a while to find it on a map.

A search on the web turned up a phone number – the Soar Mill Cove Hotel – and I arranged to go and see this little-known place.

Soar Mill Cove is even harder to find on the ground than it is on the map. In essence, it is a tiny nick in the south Devon shoreline – just around the corner from ever-popular Salcombe – and if it hadn’t been for the hotel’s directions we would have spent a frustrating hour playing peekaboo with tractors (both the Chelsea and Devon variety) in narrow lanes.

The hotel is the first sign you’ve arrived, and it doesn’t look particularly special. Low-slung, glass-walled, it has something of the 1960s school science block about it.

There’s a good rationale for all that glass, however, because virtually every window is filled with a classic view of a V-shaped cleft scalloped out of the headlands and in-filled with a deep blue sea, with the obligatory sail somewhere in the top-left corner.

The cove itself is a half-mile walk downhill beyond the hotel, through flowering yellow gorse and fields of hay. It has a clean, sheltered, golden beach with a stream for children to dam.

There are rockpools at low tide and a gentle sufficiency of waves swirls around a protective offshore rock. There are no huts or boats. Nobody sells you anything.

It is a classic image of a cove, but unlike most “classic” images there’s no need to fangle the photograph to crop out the car park and the cement factory.

Given the comparative inaccessibility of the place, I am surprised that it regularly registers among National Trust devotees’ favourite spots. “I guess we’ve got a very loyal following,” says Keith Makepeace, whose family has owned and run the Soar Mill Cove Hotel since 1978.

After a couple of days at Soar Mill, you can see why people become so attached. The hotel doesn’t pretend to have any designer aspirations, but operates according to a tried and tested formula: quality, friendliness, location.

Our bedroom had homemade biscuits, emblazoned with our children’s names, on their beds, and local chocolates and fruit on the dressing table.

Most of the guests stocked up on a fabulous cooked breakfast and spent their days in the nearby vicinity, or exploring neighbouring Hope Cove and Thurlestone Sands, until it was time for Mother Makepeace’s homemade scones.

Despite it being just three miles distant, few seemed to bother with Salcombe, an impression confirmed by Keith: “If they want Salcombe, they usually don’t want Soar Mill Cove.”

Traitorously, we did escape to Salcombe one afternoon and found it too crowded and loud, busy with the Fulham set who’d decamped for the summer to whoop it up in this yachtie creek.

Somewhere that yummy-mummies could be sure of boutique shopping and a skinny latte whenever they wanted.

In contrast, Soar Mill felt peaceful, secure and traffic-free. So when we returned to our room one evening to find our 13-year-old son missing, and a post-it note on the door that read “Swimmin wid da fishes. The Codfather”, we knew not to be concerned.

GETTING THERE:

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Soar Mill Cove Hotel (01548 561566/soarmillcovehotel.co.uk) offers doubles from £89pp per night (two sharing), including dinner, B&B.

Devon Tourist Information: 0870 608 5531/discoverdevon.com