We are the luckiest coast walkers in the world. These islands of ours offer us ramparts of cliffs, hot white sands, moody mudflats, open marshes; chalk, shale, granite, limestone, basalt; jolly red-faced resorts, shrimping villages and shingle banks where no one goes.

Penwith

Westernmost Cornwall is a winter coast par excellence with cold spray in the air, a breathless struggle against the wind, black rocks and white water seething white hundreds of feet below, and the taste of salt on your lips to add savour to that first pint in the Tinners Arms at Zennor. As for summer, when bees buzz in the heather, the coast path shimmers and Whitesand Beach beckons you down off the cliff.

Essex

The glint of mudflats in purple and tan, oystercatchers piping pik! pik! over cockleshell beaches, an eccentric houseboat rammed far up a lonely creek, a seawall path you walk for miles under huge skyscapes where cloud armies do battle, a coast village with weatherboard houses and a tiny yacht basin full of the chinking of halyards. Can all this really be only an hour from Central London?

Gower

You’ve got to go a hell of a way to find a finer walker’s coast than Gower, the blunt peninsula west of Swansea. Let’s tick off some of the treats: Three Cliffs Bay with its fabulous beaches and promontories; the shady paths of Nicholaston Woods; Oxwich’s orchid-scattered dunes; craggy cliffs near Port Eynon; the contorted strata and hidden coves and caves going west to Rhossili; a perilous, exhilarating scramble out to Worm’s Head . . . the list goes on.

Durham Coast

Twenty years ago the Durham beaches lay piled thick with coal-mine waste, and the waves broke black and brown with sewage. Since the pits closed, though, the ambitious “Turning The Tide” clean-up project has worked a small miracle. A newly improved coastal footpath leads you into flowery denes (wooded ravines), through orchid patches, along clean sands, by cliffs where peregrines hunt and fulmars glide.

Orkney

Everywhere in Orkney is coastal; every house, every field and hill, is within range and influence of the sea. Walk whichever island you please in the sprawling sandstone archipelago — Sanday, for example, shaped like a sea dragon, on a sunny day when the white sands of Tres Ness or the Bay of Sandquoy burn your feet and the sheen of the turquoise shallows is almost too intense to bear.