As families flock to the coast, Ian Bond extols the virtues of a seaside town he thinks deserves much better than to be dismissed as a joke.

A GOOD name, the good book says, might be better than riches, but in my book a bad name travels further.

I was on a prospective university visit with my son at Warwick University in Coventry. This was our sixth university and lunch followed the familiar pattern of being decanted around a table with a bunch of other parent-teenager couples.

The rules of the game were to try and keep a conversation going with someone you had never met and would never speak to again.

“What did you think of the other universities you have you visited,” I asked the father opposite. As he reeled off some of the towns they’d visited that year, Nottingham, Blackburn and, the “I-Spy” 15-pointer, Milton Keynes, I realised that we had sat down with a family of town spotters.

He asked where I was from and, not wanting to be too committal, I just said “the North-East”. At this he leant forward, hushed his voice a little: “Have you heard of a place called Seaton Carew?” he sneered.

I admitted that I knew it, had taken my kids there when they were young enough to call it Seaton Kangaroo; in fact, I’d known it since I was a boy myself and yes, I had to agree, it looked like that was the last time someone had given it a lick of paint.

They were from the West Midlands themselves and had therefore travelled a long way to visit Seaton Carew, but it was obvious from his glee that he thought its unparalleled awfulness had been worth the journey.

It wasn’t easy to disagree with his description. I hadn’t liked Seaton Carew as a kid, I only took my kids there because they could charge around on the free play area in the amusements while we sat and watched with a coffee and I could persuade them that 2p drop machines were the height of excitement. Even that amusement arcade eventually closed down.

But impressive though their town spotting skills might have been, their tick list had, however, completely missed the other Seaton Carew.

The other Seaton Carew is a place of sweeping vistas where I can lean on the sea wall and let the wind carry me from my lunch break to the towering, distant sentinel of Hunt Cliff.

A place I drive through on my way home most nights, but where I never find the same sea twice. Where a faint mist dabs the distant industry like cotton wool and vast skies reveal them not to be a “monstrous carbuncle”

but merely an oily zit on the back of our juvenile species, one that will fade as we mature. Where I inhale the air, fresh and salted, and count the birds that litter the shore, then count them again to make sure I got it right, then count them again because they dance in the Neverland between waves and rocks and deserve to be counted and counting is the best that I can do to connect with them.

ANORTH wind sweeps down over the Balamory-bright buildings of the Headland, freezing them in time as it drives white tops against rocks, which cling like sand grains to the feet of dinosaurs.

Ten thousand years ago great beasts walked here in a forest hidden by the sea. Their scant remains now lie clothed in a bed of peat and buried like treasure in the sand and in ten thousand years we will have walked here and the sea will have made pebbles of our existence.

Each visit ends with a last look as I try to memorise a sea that will never look the same again no matter how many times I look and I head on past the Seaton Carew that everyone thinks they know.

It’s also said that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, but sometimes they are one and the same.

OTHER PLACES TO ENJOY BESIDE THE SEASIDE:

■ A coffee at Wits End Café, Sandsend.

Famous for the good food, great espresso coffee, fine wines, good service and its walled garden and just 50 metres from the sea and Sandsend Bay. Fantastic views towards Whitby too.

Fish and chips at Trencher’s in Whitby.

Just as good as the famous Magpie Café, and you don’t have to queue half as long. It’s opposite the bus station.

A pint of real ale and a crab sandwich at the Ship Inn, Low Newton, in Northumberland, before watching the sun go down over the fingers of the ruined Dunstanburgh Castle.

Walk the Cleveland Way along the clifftop from Runswick Bay to Staithes, before browsing in the tempting Staithes Gallery.

Take a net and a bucket to hunt for fossils on the rocky shores between Robin Hood’s Bay and Boggle Hole.