I packed the car on a Friday night in May with my eight-year-old still in her swimming costume from the after-school lesson and the four-year-old asleep in her car seat with a chocolate finger melting into her cardigan. The plan, written on the back of a Sainsbury’s receipt, said: M3, A303, Salcombe by ten. The reality said the M3 was closed at Sunbury for resurfacing. We rolled into our Airbnb at half past midnight on a road we had no business being on, and the holiday started anyway.
This is the trip we’d talked about for two summers. A proper week in the south-west, no flights, no border queues, just the boot loaded with welly boots and a Cornish pasty habit waiting at the other end. We took the May half-term, we took the car, and we took the long way home. What follows is what actually happened, and what I’d do differently next year.
TL;DR
- A seven-day Devon and Cornwall half-term by car works well for primary-school children: two nights near Salcombe, two on Dartmoor, three around Padstow or Fowey.
- Drive in on a Tuesday or Wednesday, not the bank holiday Saturday. The A30 changeover queue at Bodmin can add ninety minutes.
- Pre-load offline OS Maps before you leave the M5 services. Dartmoor and the smaller coastal lanes drop EE and O2 to one bar in pockets.
- Budget around £900-1,400 for the week as a family of four in self-catering, plus fuel (we used £180 in petrol from Greater London and back).
- Bring full waterproofs for everyone, even in May. We had two glorious days and three that started with horizontal drizzle.
Why the South-West Works for A UKFamily Half-Term
The maths is simple. The flights aren’t there, the passports aren’t there, the foreign-language menu isn’t there. What’s there instead is a stretch of coast that does rock pools, pasties, moorland walks and one decent surf lesson inside a six-hour drive of most of England. For a family with a four-year-old who still naps and an eight-year-old who reads everything aloud from the back seat, that combination matters more than the weather forecast.
We’d done day trips to Brighton, two weekends in the Lakes, one rainy Center Parcs. This was our first big road-trip-with-luggage, and Devon-into-Cornwall was the obvious shape. Salcombe for the gentle start. Dartmoor for the wild middle. The north Cornish coast for the proper holiday days.
When to Go and How to Dodge the Worst of The Traffic
May half-term is the sweet spot if your children are still in primary school. The water’s cold but the rock pools are alive, the gardens are at full tilt, and the south-west schools haven’t broken up yet so the beaches feel like locals, not London. October half-term works for Dartmoor walks but the cliff-top playgrounds are shut and the daylight runs out by tea.
The traffic call is the bigger one. The A30 past Bodmin is the bottleneck of the entire south-west and the queues build on Saturday mornings from late May onwards. If you can take Tuesday or Wednesday off either side of the half-term week, do it. Our outbound Friday-night drive was hellish for the first two hours and empty for the last three. The return on a Thursday afternoon was clear all the way to Stonehenge.
A Seven-Day Stage Plan (London-based but Works from Anywhere South of Birmingham)
Six driving days, one rest day in the middle. We came home on the seventh.
| Day | Stage | Where we slept | What worked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | London → Salcombe (via A303 / M5) | Salcombe (self-catering near East Portlemouth) | Late arrival, no plans, fish-and-chip supper on the harbour wall |
| 2 | Salcombe morning, South Sands ferry | Salcombe | Ferry, crab line, lunch at the Winking Prawn |
| 3 | Salcombe → Postbridge → Princetown (Dartmoor) | Two Bridges area | Haytor walk, lunch at the Warren House Inn, ponies at Postbridge |
| 4 | Dartmoor day (Becky Falls or Tavistock farmers’ market) | Two Bridges area | Becky Falls toddler trail; tea and bara brith in Tavistock |
| 5 | Dartmoor → Fowey (via Plymouth) | Fowey (B&B near the harbour) | Hand-pulled ferry to Polruan, Readymoney Cove with buckets |
| 6 | Fowey → Padstow day-out → Fowey | Fowey | Stein’s pasty, Camel Trail bike hire to Wadebridge |
| 7 | Fowey → home (via A30, lunch stop at Exeter Services) | Home | Late lunch at home, washing on by nine |
A few notes on the choices. We swapped Tintagel for Becky Falls when the cliff forecast went amber on Day 4, and the four-year-old preferred the rope-bridge trail anyway. Padstow as a day-out from Fowey works better than basing yourselves there — Padstow accommodation in half-term is steep, and the drive from Fowey is under an hour through some of the prettiest lanes in the county.
A Salcombe Morning, Properly
The South Sands ferry runs every half hour from the town pontoon, costs about £4 return for a child, and drops you on a sandy beach with a sea-tractor that the kids will absolutely lose their minds over. Our eight-year-old talked about that tractor for three days. The Winking Prawn is the pub at the back of South Sands and does a children’s menu that is, blessedly, not just chicken nuggets.
A separate small thing that turned out to be the trip highlight: a crab line from the harbour shop (about £6), a bucket of seawater, and forty minutes on the steps near the Ferry Inn. Our four-year-old caught a velvet swimming crab the size of a 2p piece and we are still hearing about it.
A Dartmoor Walk that Works with A Four-Year-Old
The mistake first-timers make on Dartmoor with small children is to drive deep into the moor, park at a beauty spot in cloud, and discover that “walk” means “two hours of nothing the child can see”. Don’t do that. Park at Haytor lower car park (free, the visitor centre has loos and a small shop), and walk the easy circular up to the rocks themselves. It is forty-five minutes there and back at a four-year-old pace. The rocks are climbable for an eight-year-old with one parent close. The view is the whole moor.
For the rest day, the Postbridge clapper bridge plus a Warren House Inn lunch is the right rhythm. The ponies congregate near the clapper bridge in May. The Warren House Inn has a fire that has reportedly not gone out since 1845. We sat in it for an hour and a half and nobody asked us to leave.
Staying Reachable on The Trail
Half-term is supposed to be a break from screens, and ours mostly was. But there are five moments where a working signal stopped being a luxury and started being the holiday. Getting to the Airbnb on a back lane after midnight. Asking my mum on video call whether the bath rash was anything. Booking the Camel Trail bikes on the morning of. Telling my husband’s parents we’d landed safely. The school’s text on Day 4 about a Year 3 trip the following Monday.
What follows is what I actually did, after the first night taught me a small lesson.
EE, O2 and The Dartmoor Signal Gap
Mainstream coverage on the south-west coast is mostly fine. Salcombe town, the South Sands beachfront, Padstow harbour, Fowey, Plymouth, the A30 corridor, the M5 services at Exeter — all four UK networks held a workable signal for me on both an EE handset and a spare O2 SIM I carry. Where it falls over is the middle of Dartmoor, the deeper bits of the Camel Trail between Wadebridge and Bodmin, and the back-lane stretch from the A38 down to Salcombe after dark. EE held one bar in places where O2 dropped to nothing. Three was the weakest of the lot on the moor.
The boring-but-essential step that I now do at the Exeter motorway services on the way in: pull up offline OS Maps for the Dartmoor area on the school iPad, top up the family WhatsApp data, and pre-cache the route to the cottage in Google Maps. Five minutes. Saves the meltdown at midnight on a lane the satnav doesn’t believe in.
I also ran a second data line on my own phone for the week through HelloRoam — the travel data I trusted, set up as an eSIM on the school-run drive the morning we left, so I had a backup if the EE plan ran tight on the kids’ tablet hotspot. It rode the EE network in the south-west and held a signal in every Dartmoor spot where my main line did. Belt-and-braces, but it was £6 well spent for the peace of mind on a long week with two small humans and one tired husband.
The Audiobook Stack that Actually Got Used
This is the bit nobody tells you. On a 240-mile drive with a four-year-old, your battle is not the destination, it’s the bit between Andover and Honiton. We rotated three things on the car speakers: the BBC Sounds CBeebies bedtime collection (free, offline-cached), a Julia Donaldson audiobook (Audible, £8), and a Spotify playlist of nineties pop that the eight-year-old has decided is her music now. Pre-download everything. The A303 around Stonehenge eats 4G for breakfast.
| Spot | EE | Vodafone | O2 | Three | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salcombe town | Strong | Strong | Strong | Strong | Full coverage |
| Dartmoor (Postbridge) | One bar | One bar | None | None | Pre-cache maps |
| Haytor car park | Three bars | Two bars | One bar | One bar | Workable |
| Fowey harbour | Strong | Strong | Strong | Strong | Full coverage |
| Padstow / Wadebridge | Strong | Strong | Strong | Strong | Full coverage |
| A303 Stonehenge | Patchy | Patchy | Patchy | Patchy | Audiobooks only |
| Exeter Services | Strong | Strong | Strong | Strong | Top-up stop |
What I’d Pack Differently Next Year
Underpacked: a second waterproof for the four-year-old (her first one got soaked at Becky Falls and didn’t dry overnight), proper grippy water shoes for both (the South Sands rock pools have a barnacle layer that will draw blood through Crocs), and an old beach towel per child to leave in the boot for sandy car-seat moments.
Overpacked: the entire bag of “rainy day” board games. The cottage had Connect Four, the B&B had a chess set, and the eight-year-old made friends in the Salcombe playground inside ten minutes.
A Quick Word on Costs
We spent roughly £1,260 for the week as a family of four: £620 on self-catering and B&B nights, £180 on petrol, £210 on food (most evenings cooked, three pub lunches, two fish-and-chip suppers), £150 on activities, and £100 on incidentals. That sits at the lower end of a south-west half-term week. The two ways to push it higher: a third night in Padstow or Rock instead of day-tripping from Fowey, or any half-term week that overlaps with the Bank Holiday Monday on the inbound leg.
FAQ
How Long Does It Take to Drive from London to Cornwall with Kids? Realistically seven to nine hours door to door with two stops, depending on traffic. The London-to-Salcombe leg is around 240 miles and took us six hours on a Friday night including one services break. The leg from Dartmoor to Fowey is just over an hour and a half. The return from Fowey to London on a Thursday afternoon ran cleanly in just under six hours.
Best Cornwall Itinerary for Primary-School Children? Two-base trips work better than four. A Devon base (Salcombe, Dartmoor edge, or south Hams) plus a Cornish base (Fowey for south-coast, Padstow or Rock for north-coast) gives you variety without packing the car every night. Mid-week travel days, one rest afternoon between activity days, and a hard cap of one hour driving per day once you’re in the south-west.
Where to Stop on The A30 with Kids? Exeter Services (M5 J29) is the best big stop with proper food, soft play, and clean loos. Cornwall Services at Victoria (A30, just east of Bodmin) is the in-county equivalent and has a Cornish bakery worth queueing for. Avoid Fleet on the M3 in both directions during peak weekends.
What’s the Weather Like in Cornwall at May Half-Term? Mid-range. Average daytime highs of 14-17°C, sea around 12°C. Expect three of seven days to start grey and clear by lunch. Pack proper waterproofs and a fleece per child. The sun, when it lands, is stronger than parents expect — sun cream from Day 1.
Is Dartmoor Safe to Walk with A Four-Year-Old? Yes, on the right paths. Stick to waymarked routes near visitor car parks (Haytor, Postbridge, Becky Falls). Avoid the open moor in low cloud. Tell someone where you’re going if you’re walking more than an hour from the road. The ponies are wild — keep children at least ten metres away, don’t feed them, and they’ll ignore you politely.
Closing Note
The thing nobody puts in the itineraries is the bit where you sit on a harbour wall at half past seven with a pasty in greaseproof paper and watch a Year 3 child fall in love with a town. We had that twice. Once in Salcombe with a crab in a bucket, once in Fowey with a sky that went pink behind Polruan.
Cornwall isn’t going anywhere. Half-term will come round again. Next year I’ll book the Padstow night earlier and bring two waterproofs for the small one.
