Fiona Bawdon

Lousy weather; heated exchanges. These are the kinds of occupational hazards you might expect when planning a UK-based family holiday. 

What we did not expect during our time in Wales last month (August 2026) was to be caught in a legal spat between our holiday rental host and a third-party who spent the best part of our stay trying to force us out of the property.

To this end, the third-party’s tactics included: flagging down our car to tell us to vacate immediately claiming the property was ‘unsafe’; approaching us in a cafe a few hours later (warning it ‘would not end well’ if we didn’t comply); sending text messages to the same effect (‘I will visit the property tomorrow morning in order to confirm you have vacated’.); driving slowly past the house; arriving on the doorstep with ‘an electrician who urgently needs to isolate a circuit’ (we politely declined to let them in, on advice from the host); and then, finally, entering the house while it was briefly empty one afternoon.  The last incident felt as if a line had been crossed and, for the first time in my life, I filed a complaint for harassment with the police. We sent the third-party’s lawyers the crime number and warned any further contact would be immediately reported.

In response to each incident, we calmly repeated that we planned to stay until the end of the period we had booked and paid for (via the host). In truth, we spent hours each day trying to find alternative accommodation within striking distance suitable for five adults and two dogs. If we’d found anywhere, we’d have high-tailed it out of there in a heartbeat, leaving the warring parties to continue their scrap without us.

I like to think we are a pretty resilient, level-headed bunch (over the years, we’ve needed to be), but the experience left us seriously rattled. So much so that, after the house had been entered, we took to setting up Home Alone-style barricades behind the front and back doors at night – in case anyone decided to try to get in while we were there. 

At times it was hard not to start spiralling. Were they watching the house? (If not, how had they known who we were to approach us when we nowhere near the property? Or to enter when it was briefly unoccupied?)  Would things escalate further? Were we in physical danger? Would they harm the dogs when we weren’t there?

To add to the air of unreality, the host – with whom we were in constant contact (reporting each incident in the (unrealised) hope he could make the harassment stop) – shared the same name as our mini-schnauzer (named after an X-Men character). I don’t doubt the host was attempting to bring pressure to bear to stop the harassment but – perhaps due to the stress he was under – his behaviour during a visit to the house also seemed erratic and confusing. 

Despite everyone feeling on edge, we tried to soldier on with our holiday.

Our stay coincided with the August partial solar eclipse. Sitting outside in bright sunshine, surrounded by people with welding helmets and colanders, waiting for the sky to darken, only added to the sense that we had, indeed, entered strange times. 

Two evenings after the eclipse, we were outside the same bar around 7pm. It had been 48 hours since the last incident and we were daring to hope the police report had had the desired effect. We’d just ordered on our second bottle of wine when – one by one – every mobile phone within earshot started going off with what turned out to be the UK government’s wildfire alert (due to the unprecedented heatwave).

Only we didn’t know that was what it was, at the time.

The first message to arrive was headed: Severe Alert. With the rest of it in Welsh – a language that neither we (nor it appeared anyone else in the bar) speaks. Cue more jangled nerves and confusion.

It was a long four minutes later, while we were faffing around with Google translate, that the English language version came through and all was revealed (immediate evasive action luckily not needed). We each continued to receive alerts at random intervals for the rest of the evening (some in English; some in Welsh), with the last message arriving around 11pm.

As I’ve written here before, this is not the first time a family holiday has taken an unexpected turn. More than a decade ago, my husband was taken seriously ill while we were in north Cornwall – requiring emergency surgery and an extended stay in intensive care. It was a scary, scarring time. 

Our more recent experience was on nothing like the same scale, but it did trigger memories of being utterly blindsided and having to rapidly shift into crisis mode while a long way from home.

I arrived back in London feeling jetlagged (a first following a ‘staycation’) as I’d been too stressed to sleep. More than a month later, we’re still trying to make sense of the way our holiday was hijacked by people we’d never previously met. As one family member said to me last night: there are no lessons to be learned from it. It was completely random.

He’s right. My family – and our holiday – were just collateral in a dispute that had nothing to do with us.

We’ve not returned to Cornwall since my husband’s illness in 2013, fearing it would stir up traumatic memories. Despite the glorious location and perfect weather this year, none of us has any appetite to go back there either.

I’m not sure I dare suggest another family trip next year. In any case, we seem to be rapidly running out of UK beauty spots.