FOUR Sussex beaches have been ranked as among the best in the country by The Sunday Times.

Pagham, Tide Mills, Birling Gap and Camber Sands were all included in the newspaper’s top 50 list of best seaside resorts in the UK.

Camber Sands was praised for its “Saharan scale” and for being one of the county’s sandiest beaches.

Writer Chris Haslam said: “If, like me, you get the tide times wrong and spend a day on the Sussex coast wading through gravel, you might wonder where all the sand is. Well, it’s at Camber; all of it - piled up in dunes stitched together with marram grass and decorated with bee orchids”.

Visitors were encouraged to look out for the wooden remains of a shipwreck, believed to be the Avon which sunk in 1852.

The Argus: Camber Sands: credit - Oast House Archive/GeographCamber Sands: credit - Oast House Archive/Geograph

The newspaper said that, while paying Birling Gap a visit at high water could leave people wondering why they bothered, “at low tide, the magic is revealed: flat sand, a chalk reef, rock pools and, if you look back, the Seven Dials cliffs - Colegate-white like Simon Cowell’s teeth on the left and the horrifying drop of Beachy Head on the right”.

“Consistently one of the sunniest spots in the country”, Pagham, two miles from Bognor, was described as having an “edge-of-the-world feel, especially at the lonely west end, where the tides sweep the shingle into rippling swirls”. Visitors to the beach were encouraged to take a look inside St Wilfrid’s Church for its stained-glass windows depicting local wildlife and to take a parasol on their trip to the beach.

A lost village roughly half an hour’s drive from Brighton, the “secret beach” at Tide Mills was said to offer “spectacular” views of the Channel, while also featuring some of the remains of the houses that several families once called home.

However, all four resorts lost out to regional winner Dymchurch in Kent and to Sandhaven in South Shields, which was named Beach of the Year.

Thousands of people have flocked to Sussex’s shores over the last few days as temperatures have soared, with the warm weather expected to last for most of this week.