We’d only just turned off the main road when the satnav decided we were better off in a field. One minute we were following the polite little arrow towards The Cattle Shed, the next the hedge was scraping the passenger door and a surprised sheep was giving us the eye. By the time we’d reversed out and found the right lane again, the sun was already low over Start Bay and we were both laughing too hard to mind the detour.

The cottage itself appeared suddenly at the end of a gravel track, half-hidden behind a stone wall and a straggle of hawthorn. From the outside it looked exactly like an old cattle shed that had been talked into becoming a holiday home—whitewashed walls, slate roof, a little wooden porch with two mismatched chairs. Inside, though, it felt instantly welcoming: a wood-burner already laid, thick blankets on the sofa, and the faint smell of woodsmoke and sea air. We dropped our bags, made a cup of tea, and stepped straight back out again; the light was too good to waste.

Instead of heading straight down to the obvious beach at Torcross, we followed a footpath that seemed to lead nowhere in particular. It wound between high banks thick with campion and escaped garden flowers, then dropped us into a narrow combe we hadn’t noticed on the map. At the bottom, tucked behind a stand of sycamores, was a tiny shingle cove we later learned the locals call Duckpool—barely twenty metres of pebbles, a rope someone had strung between two posts, and water so clear we could see the stones shifting under the ripples. We stayed until the tide nudged our shoes, then wandered back up the combe by a different path and promptly got lost again.

That second wrong turn took us past an old linhay half-swallowed by brambles, where a handwritten sign pointed to “eggs and jam, honesty box.” We left a couple of quid and came away with still-warm eggs and a jar of blackberry jam that tasted of proper summer. Further on, a gap in the hedge revealed a field sloping straight down to the sea; we sat on the gate for a while, watching a lone kayaker paddle parallel to the shore, and realised neither of us had checked our phones since we’d arrived.

By the time we found our way back to the cottage the light had gone and the wood-burner was crackling away. We cooked the eggs with the last of the bread, spread the jam on toast, and ate on the porch while bats flickered overhead. It struck me, watching the dark line of the hedge against the last of the sky, how easily we could have spent the whole weekend on the main beaches and never known these little corners existed. Sometimes the satnav’s mistakes are the best part of the journey.