If you’re looking for a crowd-free holiday, this island is the perfect option.
03:14, 11 Jul 2026Updated 08:18, 11 Jul 2026
This beautiful island is in the UK(Image: Daily Record)
As the summer holidays approach, the excitement of planning a getaway often comes with the puzzle of picking the perfect spot. Luckily, being in Britain puts the diverse beauty of Europe just a stone’s throw away.
Navigating the sheer volume of stunning destinations on our doorstep can be quite the task. For those who crave peace and quiet, the secret is finding those hidden gems tucked away from the main tourist paths that still promise a sun-soaked, relaxing experience. To help you out, the travel pros at Solmar Villas analysed over 160 locations to pinpoint the absolute best spots for a crowd-free break.
Whilst most of the destinations are overseas, there is one place right here in the UK that made the list.
The Isle of Harris in Scotland came in at sixth place on the list of the quietest places to enjoy a summer holiday. Harris is the southern island of Harris and Lewis which are in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
Despite being the third biggest island on the British Isles, Harris and Lewis has a population of just 20,500 people. Known for its white-sand beaches, dramatic landscapes and low population density, it remains one of the UK’s quietest summer staycation escapes.
One of the most famous sights on the island is Luskentyre Beach which is frequently mentioned on lists of the most beautiful beaches in the world.
This long stretch of bright white sand looks as if it’s been plucked straight from the Caribbean — although the water is likely a little bit colder.
Luskentyre Beach sits on the north coast of South Harris and is protected by the island of Taransay, which you can see across the water.
Taking a wander down the white sand you can spot dolphins, seals, otters, eagles and sometimes even whales. The Isle of Harris is a gorgeous spot for a relaxed summer holiday without having to bother about airport security or expensive international flights.
To get to the island, ferries go daily from the Scottish mainland and you can take a car with you too so you can better explore what the island has to offer.
Sharon Bradbury, a travel expert at Solmar Villas , said: “Many families don’t have the option of travelling outside the school holidays, so choosing the right destination becomes even more important.
“What stands out from this research is that some of the world’s most enjoyable summer destinations don’t necessarily attract the biggest crowds. For families looking to make the most of their summer break, it can be worth looking beyond the usual hotspots.
“A quieter destination often means a more relaxed experience from the moment you arrive.”
The 20 quietest places to visit on school holidays
The history of all living things is examined through five key species chosen for the way they move, feed and reproduce and also for their size and intelligence
Chris Packham holds a baby ostrich which has just hatched in his hands(Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC Studios/Will Edwards)
Chris Packham famously hates so-called “T-shirt” animals – preferring beetles and bugs to the more box-office elephants, lions and tigers.
But for his major new BBC series examining the history of every living creature’s existence, the presenter had to block that prejudice as he looked back over 4 billion years. In Evolution, viewers will see how every plant and animal evolved – differently – from a single celled organism called LUCA.
And in order to explain this effectively, the five episodes focus on the elephant (size), ostrich (reproduction), horse (movement), bat (feeding) and dolphin (intelligence) to show what changes have happened over the millennia until they started to look a bit like the creatures we recognise today.
“TV likes an iconic species, something to put on the T-shirt,” Chris laughs, acknowledging that he doesn’t normally go for these “celebrity” animals which tend to draw in viewers, but go against the grain for Chris. “On Springwatch we’re always keen to champion the underdog, we make films about slugs and snails and flies and all those sorts of things, so we’re trying to build up that idea in people’s minds that everything counts – not just the fluffy birds in the nest, or the cute pine-marten kits. Survival of the cutest has always been an issue.”
“But had we picked, I don’t know, some innocuous little bug, it wouldn’t have looked great,” he laughed. “I’m not a great fan of T-shirt animals, but I am a fan of using them constructively.”
He even admits that filming the series, in different locations around the globe, brought him one of the best moments of his life, when he found himself right in the middle of a pod of dolphins during a break in filming. “It was absolutely extraordinary,” he says. “There were times when the cameraman was doing something and I was still in the water and I could just actually just be there with them.
“I dived down about four metres and I looked down and I had a dolphin right underneath me, under my chest. And I had couple on one side, I mean they never touch you, but they’re close, and a couple on the other side – and then I looked up and they were above me. And I was like in the middle of a pod of dolphins. You can hear them the whole time, they’re constantly clicking. So you can here that that’s that communication going on.
“It was just five minutes or something, it wasn’t a lot of time, but long enough to actually just engage, and realise that this was one of the most remarkable moments in my entire life. To be in that environment with these astonishing animals. I thought ‘blimey, I’m Flipper’.”
The five-part science show, which must be Packham’s most ambitious programme to date, has clear similarities in scope to Sir David Attenborough’s 1979 series Life on Earth, which set out to look at the earliest life forms. “I’d say it was more modern in its narrative structure,” he says thoughtfully. “Also, we’re catering for an audience that we know we need to surprise. We want to feed them short snippets, which are basically entry information into a bigger story, if you like. Those twenty-second things that get people to prick up their ears. And we want people to down the pub and say, ‘do you know what? I just watched this programme and, you won’t believe it, we couldn’t have a head before we had an arse’.
“I don’t think Life on Earth is like that. That felt very 1970s, because that’s when it was made, this just feels like a really modern, cutting-edge version.”
To film the series the BBC team were very careful about where they went in order to limit the carbon footprint. “Ten or 15 years ago, we would have gone to multiple locations to make a series like this,” Chris says. “But I’m pleased to say that each of our programmes was essentially made in one location.”
The elephants in the series opener were filmed in Kenya and the ostriches in South Africa. The horses were in the UK, with three days in France which was reached by train. Then the dolphins were in the Bahamas and the bats were in Borneo.
Chris says his role as presenter on the show, from the team who previously brought us Earth, is to keep the audience enthralled, and showing his own excitement is a big part of that, just as he experienced while watching his hero Attenborough. He particularly remembers a programme made by the veteran broadcaster about birds of paradise, filmed in Papua New Guinea.
“They were my dream birds because they’re mental, they look like space aliens,” he explains. “And I was sat there waiting for it to come on, just thinking, ‘you b****rd, I want to go to Papua, I want to see that.’ But in fact my response to the programme, and a testament to his broadcasting, was that I absolutely loved it because I felt the connection to the birds through his joy.”
Chris found himself caught up in some beautiful moments that will also tug at the audience’s heartstrings, such as when a baby ostrich hatched out of its egg right into his hands. “You’re peering into it, it’s not even in the world yet, and it’s like you’ve had a sneak preview into a life which is going to unfold,” he marvels. “It’s just this little thing moving, and that was really very emotional, that formation of new life.”
Learning new stuff is “the greatest joy” of his job. “I get to work with people who know more about a subject than I do. And their job is to tell me and the team everything they know about it in 30 seconds,” he says. “So my joy is that I attend the University of Zoology every single day that I’m working, and this is updated information, so we’ve constantly gone to the latest science.”
While they don’t skirt away from the technical stuff, like explaining how DNA works, Chris feels it is carefully woven into the narrative. “There’s no dumbing down, but we are conscious constantly of building a narrative which will keep our audience engaged.”
A couple converted an £8k van during the pandemic, despite having no experience, and since then have swapped exotic trips abroad for staycations to some very unusual UK locations
The couple have semi-retired and work on a YouTube channel(Image: Read Media Ltd/Andy and Claire Stocks)
A “battered” carpenter’s van that cost £8,000 changed the course of one couple’s lives after they turned it into a home on wheels.
Andy and Claire Stocks, also known as St Christopher of Atlantisto more than 45,000 followers on YouTube, have swapped foreign holidays for staycations in their van, sharing their adventures across the UK’s underrated spots with their fans.
The Barnsley couple fell into van life accidentally, taking on the task of turning a van into a motorhome after their Mercedes broke down during the pandemic and they were unable to get parts. “It started to get this intermittent fault on the dashboard and I didn’t really want to part with the car, but it got worse and worse, and it was coming up more and more,” Andy explained.
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“I was a little bit annoyed at it. So, I decided to buy a van instead. I just kind of threw the teddy out of the pram because the car that I liked, I couldn’t have.”
But that van ended up being life-changing for the couple. They swapped exotic jaunts to hotels and Airbnbs in the Far East and Central America for simpler staycations, and have now semi-retired to spend more time on the road and focus on their YouTube channel.
The couple has also turned their adventures into a book: It Started with a Van, due to be released in paperback on July 16. The story begins with them finding a van and deciding to give vanlife a go, with Andy noting he had no experience and “an unrealistic amount of confidence” when he took on the project.
Andy admitted that the start of the project had its hitches. “The first job that I had to do – there’s a bulkhead that separates the cab from the back to stop things flying into the cabin. So, I had to remove that. I thought that was going to be a really easy job. And I started taking the bolts out, and they were all good apart from one bolt, and that took me two weeks to actually get rid of. So it kind of set the tone for everything else that followed.”
While they learned some skills from YouTube and a book on conversions, the couple went into the project blind, doing jobs after work in the winter whenever they had enough light.
In addition to the initial cost of £8,000 for the van, the couple spent a “few thousand” on the renovations, although they haven’t worked out the true amount. Andy joked: “I might be in trouble with her if I did.”
Their first trip in the van was to Conwy in Wales, and it took place with the build half-done. The couple admitted it was less glamorous than many vanlife influencers would have you believe.
“I was trying to sell the lifestyle to Claire. What actually happened was we sat in a car park with a sandwich. On the bare floor,” laughed Andy.
As they worked on the van the couple had the idea to put updates on their progress on YouTube. They have since built a base of thousands of subscribers. But at first, the reception wasn’t quite what they expected.
Andy said: “When we put it out on YouTube, I think people thought it was a bit of a joke. Some of the initial comments were, ‘Oh, that was really funny. That was, you know, you made me laugh.’ And actually, that wasn’t your intention at all.
“No, I put my best foot forward thinking this would show people how to build a van, but they thought it was more of a funny sort of parody type thing really.”
However, they persevered and have now cut their work days to three a week to allow them to spend more time in the van and creating YouTube content.
In a typical day, the couple travel to a campsite and create a video tour of the facilities. “A lot of people book campsites off the back of us. We turn up, we set the pitch up, then we grab the cameras, and then we will go and tour the campsite and the surrounding area. And then when we’ve done that, we come back to the motor home and we’re working basically,” Andy said.
“The illusion is that we are out and just on campsites and enjoying ourselves., But we’re editing, we’re dealing with the social media side, the comments. And so it’s like our motor home now, it’s a bit like an office on wheels.”
Despite the success of their build, Andy conceded that if they had to do it all again, he’d “probably get somebody else to build it because I really found out what my limits were.”
After enjoying adventures that took them all the way to Italy through Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium, plus lots of staycations, the couple eventually traded in their carpenter’s van, opting to buy a motorhome instead.
As a couple on the road all the time, Andy and Claire noted that living in tight quarters can lead to annoyances. Their original van had no separate seating area, just a bed, and no built-in toilet, so they had to rely on campsite facilities and stay “mega organised” to cope.
The couple also dealt with breakdowns and an incident where they ended up trapped in a full-blown blizzard. Perhaps most memorable was when they ended up in completely the wrong place.
Andy said: “We did have an occasion where we put in the wrong location into the satnav. I went to the completely incorrect country. It said we should have been somewhere in France. We ended up in Belgium.”
Debunking a common myth, Andy and Claire say they like to support the local economies in places they visit, often highlighting local cafes, bars, and shops on their channel.
And their trip highlights? The Isle of Mull was a favourite of Claire’s as it has “the most wonderful sunset we’ve ever seen”. She recommended a campsite called Fidden Farmand said: “And the beaches truly are white beaches up there”, comparing it to the Maldives.
Andy’s favourite was a little more unusual: “This is a really random place that we would never expect it. We went to Hartlepool Marina and we saw dolphins. It was so beautiful, kind of an industrial location actually, but then you look up and you’re watching the dolphins.Goodness!
“The Northeast is a bit like that. You know, you can be on a beach and you look one way and there’s industry, but then you look the other way and you’ve got wildlife. Everywhere has got something going for it.”
So, will Andy and Claire ever hang up their motorhome keys? The couple said that they’d like to stay on the road for as long as possible. “We are quite young to be motorhomers. The demographic of our channel is a lot of people that are older than us. So, we’ve got all that to go and we’ll do it as long as we enjoy it,” Andy added.
And his advice to anyone thinking of taking on this kind of life? “Just do it now while you can. Just do whatever you want to do. Get out and do it. That’s my advice.”
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