This was run in The Times in about 1992

Even living in Herefordshire, the greenest county in England, you notice something special - somewhere around Wiltshire I'd say - as you drive toward the Dorest coast. The landscape seems take on a sort of bounciness, as though the Great Geologist had thrown the hills in the air like a woman shaking out her candlewick. The hills billow and blow, and you ride over the top of them as though a child tossed in blanket. Is there also that smell of the sea as you get nearer? That moment which recalls the relief of suddenly seeing the sparkle of the briney, sighted in the cleavage of downland, in perfect imitation of a hundred school-desk sketches, after a few hours on the unmercifully wallowy springing of the back seat of the family Vauxhall Cresta when Pat Boone was big in the charts and the world was young?

Swanage is hardly the jewel of the Isle of Purbeck. It is its polite diamante, though, and we always head there. It used to be to the last scruffy mobile home on a trailer park near the private prep school, back of the tennis courts. It was what a caravan should be: a touch ricketty and lit by gas, with mantles which popped and hissed. No lavatory, and we didn't always get the sink tap to work. Year on year, it deserved its name by being moved as it was given less and less favoured pitches, slithering seasonally, literally and metaphorically down hill. Its decrepitude had achieved for it downard mobility: perhaps by now it has been banished altogether.

Cost-cutting, and space-seeking, we now cruise along to Herston Yards campsite, where there is nothing much but trees and sward. It is a Larkin kind of a spot, with tangled roses poking through the bright whitewash of the men's showers and an abondoned Morris 1100, alive with nettles and rust, growing roots beside them. The country is becoming oppressively neat everywhere and I find I need signs of determined scruffiness before I can be happy. Not squalor, of course: Herston Yards amenities are gleaming. But they are not modern. They are haphazard and efficient, a little as one wants to be oneself.

Mind you, the people who run the campsite - not young, not forward looking - are very nice on the phone when you book and not above a little improvement here and there when no other recourse is open to them. This year we went in June. The lady did not demur when I said the weather had been bloody and were they even open, or swamped out? Ah, she said, they'd ordered some roadstone and were going to do up the track. Stick to it as far as possible and the axles might just be kept out of the mire.

In fact, Dorset, as it often will, seemed to send out a sort of benignity as we journeyed south. We need not have stayed at the Bankes Arms at Corfe Castle for our first night, but had not dared risk pitching tents in the rain in the dark when we find it hard enough with everything going for us. In any case, it was something to sleep in the lea of the castle which Cromwell's artillery turned into a gap-toothed wreck. Not that the kids could be persuaded to romp on the hill it's perched on as the delicious light of that evening thought of fading. There is something about the children of parents who aspire to the primitive, the natural, you know all that. As we hold out for something like hippy values, knowing them to be damned useful when you're thrown out of work or the economy wobbles, the kids see a decent en suite and a teas maid and a colour TV at the foot of the bed and know what real heaven is.

As others before us, we didn't at first know we were booking at the Bankes Arms in Corfe, thinking that we were booking for the Bankes Arms at Studland Bay. Apparently, quite a lot of guests get shuttled between the two before they find a bed to sleep in. They are both owned by the National Trust, and were a part of the great Bankes bequest to the direct debit aristocracy in 1981. Indeed, the whole region is wonderfully geared to tourism because it mostly belongs to the NT, or to a few other estates which also like cropping visitors. The National Trust influence explains much of why it is also a region of almost crushing niceness.

So, to be frank, the slight vulgarity of the Bankes Arms - Corfe version - is quite welcome. Mind you, if I've heard Jennifer Warms and Joe Cocker going on about "love lift you up" once, I've heard them both times I've eaten there. But I was in the mood for muzak of such a high order, and the food was good too. I heard on the grapevine that Mike Perry, the (Corfe) Bankes Arms' amiable and busy tenant, wanted to put up a Happy Eater style climbing tree in his beer garden. The National Trust soon nipped that one in the bud, but it's a moot point as to whether they should have. It could have been painted NT Green.

They were pummelling good local stone - this is quarrying country - into the track when we made camp under the oak trees. The kids did that thing which makes camping on public sistes such bliss: they disappeared into peaceable gang warfare from which they only return for field dressings against nettle stings and bramble cuts. When will the twelve year old suddenly realise that this messing about is beneath her dignity and disappear into the thraldom of boys? God knows, she's beginning to be pretty grand.

There is a man in Swanage who knows how to make you feel that perhaps childhood can last for a very long time indeed. Simon Winch ("Just a simple crank", he calls himself) runs the sailing school, and gave us a spin within hours of declaring the season open by getting two youngsters with a Landrover to reverse his seventeen foot Devon yawl into the water. They worked well as a team when one of the two boys could unwind himself from his blonde.

It was the first time, after years of going to the place, that I had seen the coast the only which really thrills. Utterly composed, and talking the while as though a trappist monastery awaited his first silence, Mr Winch let the kids helm. Devon yawls are as elegant as full-scale yachts, but dance like dinghies: our was on her ear and fast, ripping in amongst the moored boats, bowsprit pointing accusingly at all and sundry, and no-one but me seeming remotely conscious that mistakes could be expensive. I wondered if the pull of sail might not yet claim one or other of my youngsters back from the world of Walkmen and rap.

You'll say I'm a fool, but there's more to tell about mild Swanage. Mainly, there's always something to do. For instance, this year a local quarry has sponsored sculptors to work stone on the front. One of them had tried the local rock and found it too hard to work: he had hauled his own oolitic sandstone down from the softer Bath hills. What could be nicer than to suck an ice cream and bat the breeze with a bloke finding the medieval gryphon in a lump of white, nobbly stuff in the sunshine?

Well, it might be what we did next. A totter to a grassy field by the beach and there were some very rude late afternoon music to be had from the likes of Dick Morrissey at the Swanage Jazz and Blues Festival. Kids free, all day beer in the same tent, and all the time in the world to show the youngsters that there remains a role for spectacularly unfit men in black terylene trousers and white nylon shirts. They become jazzmen, and back women like Marilyn Middleton Pollock, who sings like an angel about women who are anything but. It improves the repertoire of an eight year old girl no end to skip home singing: "Your key don't fit my door no more/You've got the right key but you're workin' the wrong door".

A man swiped the record we'd bought. (One of the tyro helmswomen - flush with new authority - spotted it in his satchel and soon had it back. On the other hand, this being seriously honest injun country, the shoes we'd left by the road were neatly on the nearby wall the next day, and not the scruffiest shoes we possess, either.)

A quick trip to Gateway for steak, a fast barby (I've bought a new one which looks like a briefcase) before we trooped off to the high quality amateur dramatics at the Mowlem theatre on the front. The show was a couple of one-acters: class warfare and an over-sexed Colonels' wife with the hots for a sensitive other-ranks warmed us up for a sharp little Terence Rattigan. I've learned to go steady on the gins at the Mowlem, having nearly passed out from alcohol, sunstroke and lack of air during a summer season performance of Guys and Dolls there. Or was it at Annie, another year?

Should a hangover need clearing, there is nothing like the downland yomp from the obelisk on the downs at Swanage, to Corfe. It's three or five miles, according to which child I'm talking to. Down to the west, the steam train line whoops and belches part of the way in a Railway Children valley. To the east, there's the panorama of Poole Harbour. This June, it was like the last act of King Lear, and we stripped out of drenched nylon in the loos of the (Corfe) Bankes Arms like we owned the place. I don't remember enjoying a roast lunch so much, ever.

For years we have pursued the same round. The cliff which is a quarry at Dancing Ledge, down the path where once we found a red ant specialist doing a count, beyond the farm where the owner sometimes give public astronomy parties in his observatory. This, followed by drinks in the Square and Compass where chickens scratch and you're surprised anything as modern as crisps are on sale. We went to Allworth once, but it's too much and too little at the same time. We've done a good deal of time at Kimmeridge, a place so unspoilt by being an oil field that I've become quite bullish when people complain about oil companies. It's a rock-pool paradise, virtuously ugly but striking. Mrs North usually finds herself walking great chunks of the Dorset clifftop path from here. I know it's worth it - spectacularly worth it - but a novel and an ice cream usually claim me and the kids.

Studland Bay is where we go for hours and hours, day after day. In high summer, so crammed is this three mile stretch of sand edged by heath and cliff, that you have to get there by nine or ten in the morning, or face enormous traffic queues. Yet somehow the NT's benign management makes you put up with the absurdity of the jams, and even the jet skis and the horrid speedboats of every size which blatantly ignore the rules about not going fast inside the marker buoys.

I once lost my drawers as I plunged into a swallow dive in about a foot of water, grazing my lobster chest on the sandy bottom, to swim out to berate a youth - peroxide, ear-ring, mohican razor cut, gold bracelet - in a speedboat in Studland's Caribbean waters. I have very seldom not sworn loudly when angry, but he had such a head start on me that I found myself bleating in a high-pitched voice which I could not recognise as I hung on to the gleaming gunwale of his go-faster. At that moment, I would have liked to be a hanging judge in an age when you made up the law as you went along. Oh, God, to be Clint Eastwood at such a time. Can't I just waste this man, make my day, with this little waterproof Derringer I have strapped to my ankle?

It's no good. Anger will surface often enough on holiday without getting worried about 65 horse power tykes. And so we take ourselves to a place where the calm, the studiously classical, the measured and orderly is everywhere. Kingston Lacey was the family seat of the Bankes family. The jewel of the Bankes bequest, it is now a monument to reason and loveliness. Take in the Judgement of Solomon, which even this peasant can see is a wonder of draughtsmanship. Calm down in the library, which has the telephones and telegraph forms of some time just after the war. It is a curiosity that the main work on the house was by a Bankes scion who was done for consorting with guardsmen in the Park: he directed the work from Italy. I frankly warm to the idea that even a man with such perfect taste was not under perfect control. His descendant's fantastic present very nearly is.