A family on summer holiday visit the cliff top village of Lynton and the port harbour of Lynmouth in Exmoor National Park in North Devon. The resort became popular in Georgian times and paddle steamers were soon bringing in visitors from Swansea and Bristol. A tramway known as the Cliff Valley Railway was completed by 1890. The villages are on the South West Coast Path and the Tarka Trail and the Two Moors Way taking in Exmoor and Dartmoor runs from Lynmouth to Ivybridge.

Holidays at the seaside were common during the Depression years of the 1930s because the Wall Street financial crash had pushed prices down making them affordable to more sections of society and in general families were also by now smaller units. These were traditional holidays and people stayed in hotels and Bed and Breakfast accommodation. Package holidays and holiday camps were about to be launched as the popularity of holidays by the seaside was growing. Billy Butlin opened his first holiday camp at Skegness in 1936 and there was to be a boom in holidays after the Second World War due in part to the right to statutory paid holidays becoming law in 1938.