‘In a decade, our wildlife has gone from being present to being abundant,’ says Martin White, the head of rewilding at 42 Acres, a sweep of wooded countryside in east Somerset. Behind him, meadow brown butterflies tumble through oat-grass and blackcaps sing from tangled hawthorns. White is well placed to comment, having worked here for every one of the 10 years since this former family estate was taken over by the current owners.

The 42 Acres name is a misnomer. This rural getaway — which offers wellness retreats and self-catering accommodation — was originally 42 acres in size, but now covers 173, most of which are intentionally left to their own natural devices. The retreats themselves tie into this approach, ranging from one-day ‘Slow Sundays’ to longer stays, themed around the likes of nature guardianship and listening to the land. And there’s plenty of land to listen to. The wind whistles through ancient woodland studded with mossy, fallen trunks and pale fungi; birdsong fills the ears during a stroll down country lanes; in the lake, carp splash and water sloshes against hefty beaver dams.

Yes, beaver dams. The busy rodents have been reintroduced here and now live wild, with evidence of their lodges and waterlogging widespread. ‘They’re a keystone species,’ emphasises White, pointing out a muddy, beaver-made channel. ‘The benefits they bring to other creatures in the ecosystem are huge.’

The rewilding efforts take multiple forms. In one large area of native woodland, spruces planted for wartime timber are being thinned out to allow original species to flourish. Elsewhere, netted enclosures are home, separately, to white storks and wildcats, both of which — if breeding continues to be successful — will eventually be released. To look into the eyes of a wildcat, one of Britain’s most endangered mammals, is a rare thrill.

42 Acres describes itself as a ‘regenerative estate, nature reserve and wellbeing retreat centre’, and it’s the real deal on all three fronts. This do-it-right-or-not-at-all approach is also true of both its accommodation and its food.

There are two main clusters of buildings on site, one based around a refurbished 18th-century farmhouse, the other around a one-time hunting lodge. In and around them are a total of seven self-catering options, from cottages and renovated barns, to converted stables and a boat (it’s called Tiny Boat (above) and lets you gaze across the water from bed). If you’re staying in one of these properties, the wider grounds are yours to explore — and indeed swim in — at will, while meals such as breakfast baskets and vegetarian lasagne can be pre-ordered.

Eating is no afterthought. All food, which includes full catering for guests on scheduled retreats, is freshly prepared by the so-called ‘medicine kitchen’. Don’t be put off by the pharmaceutical-sounding description: the chefs are hugely experienced (there’s at least one Royal Academy of Culinary Arts graduate), passionate about organic ‘soil-to-gut’ dining, and have a bounty of hyper-local produce to work with.

Most of this comes courtesy of either the edible walled garden — a vibrant reimagining of a traditional English estate with everything from artichokes and sweet-tasting yacón to peaches and greengages, or the permaculture garden, which produces duck eggs, honey and some 50 (50!) varieties of vegetables.

There are guided tours of the gardens, as well as yoga, foraging, firecraft and wild sauna sessions. But all, in a sense, are sideshows to the main rewilding project, the green effervescence which is likely to be your abiding memory. ‘Rewilding,’ sums up White, as a woodpecker drops down into a canopy of maples, ‘really does work.’

Visit the 42 Acres website for more information and to book.

According to Waitrose, the ‘rosé tipping point’ — the outdoor temperature at which Britain’s middle classes start glugging the salmon-pink lady petrol with the same enthusiasm of a water-starved castaway — is 20˚C. Given that the Isle of Wight averages 37 hours of sunshine a week, you’d be forgiven for thinking islanders are popping the cork all year round and in truth, you’re probably right.

The pretty Victorian seaside resort of Ventnor, on the south-east coast of the island, enjoys both above-average sunshine hours and its own microclimate with air, according to The Times in 1841 ‘assimilated to the mild climate of the island of Madeira’ and, to paraphrase Sir John Betjeman, areas of garden so full of exotics, you almost expect a bird of paradise to flit from bloom to bloom. Others have drawn comparison with the Amalfi coast, with Ventnor’s breakneck precipices, zig-zag roads and steep steps echoing those of Positano.

Along the esplanade, directly behind where Ventnor’s 478 foot New Victoria Pier once jutted proudly out to sea, stands The Terrace Rooms & Wine, an immaculately restored Italianate-style villa — with turrets that are said to have inspired Prince Albert’s designs for Osborne House — that offers a more indulgent restorative for those that need a tad more than sea air and sub-tropical climes: wine.

Owned and run by Tom and Ashley Fahey, the six-bedroom boutique bolthole oozes relaxed epicurean indulgence. The rooms are light and airy, conceived in muted tones of putty, peach and artichoke; a pleasing blend of period features complemented by mid-century furniture, sumptuous super-king Hypnos beds and soothing sea views. The dusky scent of rose geranium and cloves gently wafts from the sensorial La-Eva products found in the bathrooms. We stayed in Room Five, an expansive split-level option that also offered views of the beautiful Cascade Gardens (designed at the turn of the 20th century by then town surveyor Edgar James Harvey) that tumble down towards the lapping sea. For those that insist on travelling with their two-or-four-legged shadow(s), sizeable Room Six (The Annexe) is both child (aged 12 or older) and dog friendly. 

Downstairs, the residents’ drawing room yawns out onto a sunlit glass pergola overlooking the coppery shingle and golden sand beach. If the view alone isn’t enough to feast on, prepare yourself for the exquisite four-course breakfast served in this room. I’ve eaten many hotel breakfasts and I can say, hand on heart, this was one of the best. Highlights include — but were not limited to — homemade Irish soda bread and bite-sized sausage rolls, a deconstructed full English (including Isle of Wight tomatoes — yes, please), Oxfordshire’s finest Ue coffee and local Briddlesford Farm milk, fresh from their Guernsey herd.

Now, back to the main event — the bottled poetry. Tom is ranked a Top 12 UK Sommelier (2025) and the hotel holds both the UK’s best rosé wine list and best New Zealand wine list (Star Wine List Awards 2025). In essence, you’re in excellent hands. Each evening, residents are invited to a wine tasting in the magnificent wine library, home to about 1,200 bottles which line the walls and almost every available surface. The tastings are gloriously unpretentious and, as Tom assures a fellow guest, ‘there are no rules here.’

As he pulls out three bottles — two rosés (one pale, one dark) and a red — all produced by Château du Cros in Bordeaux, we discuss the UK’s preference for the palest of the pale. He explains that in 1985, Château Barbeyrolles created the style we all now know as pale Provence rosé using a winemaking method called ‘direct press’. Meanwhile, Californian White Zinfandel was swiftly becoming the gateway wine of an entire generation, embedding the idea that dark rosé is sweet and estates such as Miraval, Domaines Ott and Chateau D’Esclans were turning pale rosé into a yachties lifestyle brand.

‘This is now a crisis for many wine regions,’ Tom sighs. ‘It is now almost impossible to put quality dark rosé on a shelf and expect anyone to look twice at it. The standard order for “your palest” or “the one most like Provence” rosé has negatively impacted traditional — and ironically bone dry — styles from Navarra, Tavel, Bordeaux and Montepulciano. Producers in these areas must palewash or die.’

Feeling a little ashamed of my own misconceptions, we taste the three Bordeaux on the table. The 2022 endangered dark rosé is lusciously dry with notes of dried peel, pink grapefruit and baking spice — the perfect Christmassy winter wine or in fact, is it a year-round rosé? It’s a revelation.

As we mull over what we might like to sup in front of the roaring residents room fire that evening, I dare to raise the question of ice — is it an oenophile’s faux pas? Tom reveals that at the low soaking temperatures during the winemaking process, the skins lend colour and flavour, but none of the astringent tannin that often leads consumers to shun ‘too dry’ red wines. ‘They are not simply winter rosés, but a superb red alternative all year round,’ he confirms. ‘And — whisper it! — they often take an ice cube far, far better than their under-flavoured pale cousins, creating an almost Campari or negroni like feel to a slightly longer and — unlike vermouth — bone dry drink.’

Rooms at The Terrace Rooms & Wine start from £250 a night including four-course breakfast and nightly wine tastings. Visit the hotel website for more information and to book.

Loch Fyne is Scotland’s longest sea loch, reaching 40 miles inland from the Sound of Bute. Kabn, a pair of private, off-grid cabins, is close to its head. From Glasgow, it only takes an hour to reach them, driving along Loch Lomond and down a bumpy track that cuts through the Ardkinglas Estate.

Our cabin — sleek and black, all charred timber topped with solar panels, and floor-to-ceiling windows — stands sentry between a woodland stream and the shoreline. Inside, there’s a cloud-like bed, a hot rain shower, a well-equipped kitchen (with 15 herbs and spices) and a wood-burning stove. Everything is considered and sustainably sourced, including the recycled plastic duvet.

For now, though, our focus is on the outside: swimming in the icy water; barbecuing on the Big Green Egg; sitting by the fire pit; watching the light on the loch. We’re absorbed by the flicker of flames, thinking about everything and nothing. And then a seal pops its whiskery head out of the water and looks at us, and we could hardly be happier.

Cabins are having a moment. Not all of them are strictly off-grid (meaning that they function independently of public utility networks), however, they are often remote enough to feel like it. The majority featured below are only connected to the mains for water.

Of the luxury 'glamping' accommodation represented by Canopy & Stars, cabins account for 352 of 855 places and 50% of bookings. They mostly appeal to urban couples, aged 25-44, according to the specialist, especially 25-34 year olds who live in London, Manchester and Bristol and want to mark a special occasion. Solo travellers also like them. ‘They’re one of the fastest growing parts of our collection,’ agrees Sarah de Vere-Drummond of Kip Hideaways, ‘especially those that have something special, like an outdoor bath, or a wild swimming spot or re-wilding landscape on their doorstep.’

The rising popularity of cabins reflects a wider shift in hospitality, say the founders of Koto, who make place-specific cabins for private homes and, increasingly, members’ clubs, luxury wellness and international hotel groups. ‘Guests are moving away from traditional hotel formats towards something more personal and immersive, closer to a private retreat than a standard room.’ Architects Holiday are more direct: ‘We offer an alternative hotel solution for a new world demanding change, with health, wellbeing and environmentalism at the forefront.’

This need for change is often informed by disillusionment or burnout — including among the cabin owners themselves. Kabn founders Amber and Charlie Teale both had ‘risk-averse corporate careers’ before they realised their passions lay elsewhere. Jimmy Roupell ran a toy company (it went down a storm on Dragon’s Den), but dreamt up Rest + Wild because the ‘pace felt unsustainable and the purpose no longer felt right’. Hector Hughes worked for a tech startup, ‘flying around the world, spending all day on my phone’ and launched Unplugged following a 10-day stint in a Buddhist temple on top of a mountain. He wants to plug a gap in the market between high-end and spiritual retreats. ‘The big reflection for me is that we have ended up, for better or worse, with an environment, lifestyle and society that’s unsuited to how we’re biologically designed,’ he says.

Unplugged suggests that you lock away your phone, but even if you cannot quite do it, a cabin is a great way to disconnect, says cabin-goer and Country Life’s Digital Commissioning Editor, James Fisher. ‘It’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but the real break these days is from your emails. When you go to a cabin where you’re left alone and you open the curtains in the morning and the whole natural world is revealed to you, your brain switches off in a way it doesn’t necessarily when you’re staying in the nicest suite at Claridge’s. It’s a different kind of luxury that only the natural world and a true sense of escape can provide.’

When nature is at the heart of something, design that prioritises low-impact construction, locally-sourced materials and energy-efficient operation is part and parcel. Japanese and Scandi influences run rife; clever storage is key. They rarely feel too pared back though, because cabin owners are experts at ‘finessing the wild luxury experience,’ according to Sarah. At the time of writing, 155 of Canopy & Stars’ cabins come with hot tubs, while 58 have a sauna. However, cabin goers do not expect, or even want, too much luxury, and to be waited on hand and foot. ‘It’s that feeling of being fully independent and away from it all,’ says James. ‘I think we are starting to realise, especially with the advent of AI, that we’re slowly losing the ability to even think for ourselves, and that is really what we need a holiday from — that sense of being swaddled.’

For some guests, taking time out has proved a profound experience, even a life-changing one. ‘People write letters to us saying, “This has helped our marriage”, “This has helped us have a baby”, “This has helped me grieve”,’ says Jimmy of Rest + Wild. The visitor’s book at Kabn is further proof. The comments — ‘We watched the weather change, spotted otters and spent time reading and sketching; I leave feeling restored and hopeful.’ — are heartfelt, ecstatic even, waxing lyrical about the scenery and the wildlife.

During our two-day stay, my twin sister and I spend a lot of time tracing the water’s edge, watching the oyster catchers and the seals, reuniting a tiny lamb that found itself on the wrong side of a fence with its mother and enjoying the sense of joy that comes with being a part of something bigger.

Cabins make it easier for city dwellers to dip their toes into the ‘simple life’ — with minimal fuss and footprint. We get to stay on farms and the grounds of stately homes; in return, landowners get to better balance their books. They reinforce the beauty and value of nature and the need to protect it. Sometimes, they even encourage us to make changes to our lives. And they offer the same restorative effects as a good spa break in a shorter space of time and at a lower cost. They really are a win-win.

Kabn, Loch Fyne, Scotland

Amber and Charlie Teale were inspired to set up Kabn following holidays in Africa and Japan. They loved ‘staying in a really lovely property in the middle of nowhere,’ and the ‘feeling that the minimalist aesthetic of Japan creates.’

Food is a priority. Guests can eat or buy fresh seafood from the brilliant Loch Fyne Restaurant & Oyster Bar and Inveraray Seafood Shack.

Cabins in the Cairngorms and Sutherland are on the horizon (in September 2026 and 2027 respectively).

Two nights in a Kabn cabin start from £510.

Elsa, Unplugged, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall

The focus at Unplugged is on digital detoxing, with guests invited to lock away their phones for three nights. An instant camera is provided for photographs, and a Nokia for emergencies.

The startup now has more than 50 cabins spread across the UK and Spain; Elsa is one of 10 with a hot tub and sits in a dark-sky preserve on farmland grazed by wild ponies and Highland cows. There are more Unplugged cabins to come, says co-founder Hector Hughes. ‘We want to get as many people as possible doing this. The challenge for us is, can we make it socially acceptable and cool and aspirational to spend three days offline in a cabin?’

Three nights in Elsa start from £575.

The Red Cabin, Oare, Kent

The Red Cabin was always going to be in good hands with Tally Rix, who used to edit Architect’s Journal Specification and still publishes Open Air Business Magazine (a trade publication for diversifying landowners) alongside husband Steve.

There are now five locally-hosted Red Cabins in Kent, Norfolk, the Somerset Levels and the Cotswolds — the latter on the regenerative farm of Andy Cato (of Groove Armada and Wildfarmed fame). All sleep up to three or four, and have integrated wood-fired saunas, hot tubs or plunge pools and Passivhaus insulation; at Red Cabin Oare, outside Faversham, guests can swim or paddle board on twin lakes and walk through the Oare Marshes bird reserve to the Three Mariners pub. A firm favourite.

Two nights in a Red Cabin for four people start from £450.

Architects Holiday, Great Park Farm, near Battle, East Sussex

This growing cluster of cabins is a passion project of Built Works’ architects Will Gowland and Harry Kay — and sits on Will’s family farm outside Battle. Rituals are the big thing here: new Yogis Cabin comes with a yoga studio, spring-fed natural swimming pool, engawa wraparound deck and woodland views. There is also Bather’s Cabin, Cabin X and Hill Cabin, plus a farm shop and a wood-fired sauna that guests can book for private three-hour sessions.

Yogis Cabin starts from £320 a night; sauna sessions from £45.

Rest + Wild, Shropshire

Rest + Wild is all about taking time out, sinking into an outdoor copper bath and immersing yourself in ‘pockets of the country where you don’t hear anything but birdsong.’ Jimmy and wife Sarah now have four collections of three cabins in Exmoor, Yorkshire and Shropshire. The latter are buried in 5,000 acres of ancient woodland and rolling hills on the Downton Hall Estate, outside Ludlow, and are being refreshed for the summer holidays.

Two nights in a Rest + Wild cabin start from £400.

Denton Reserve, near Ilkley, North Yorkshire

Denton Reserve turned to Koto when it came to installing cabins on their 2,500-acre estate, plumping for their Haku off-grid suites on wheels model, which can be moved to make the most of viewing points and wildlife.

The three cabins join a Grade I-listed Georgian hall, The Penny Bun gastropub, wild swimming site and walled kitchen garden. You’ll fall asleep to the soundtrack of hooting tawny, little and barn owns.

Denton Reserve’s cabins start from £220 a night.

What we think of when we picture luxury travel has changed over the years. Now it’s less private jets and piña coladas and more yoga retreats and home-made kombucha. We are, it seems, looking for meaningful experiences that enrich our lives instead of flashy status-symbols. As usual, throughout this process, people have been reminded that nature is priceless — particularly when it comes to the British countryside.

Although scrambling through the hedgerow in search of rosehips may not instantly scream ‘five star getaway’, foraging courses are now on the docket for many a luxury hotel guest in the UK.

At Bovey Castle, set amongst Dartmoor National Park in Devon, navelwort and nettle beer are on the menu just as much as caviar and Champagne are. It is just one of the Pride of Britain (PoB) Hotels — a curated collection of British hotels is annually reviewed — that are putting on foraging days.

‘A lot of people come to the hotel and they'll look at the view, but they won't actually explore the grounds. When you go out into these grounds today, you'll think: “Why are people not exploring this?” It's heaven down there, it's fantastic,’ says Thomas Radford, who is leading our foraging walk.

On the allure of foraging he adds: ‘I think people like to be guided and feel safe and, as opposed to just another boring drudge around the woods, it is something that brings it to life.’ In this country foraging is legal, as long as it’s not done on private land (for this you must have specific permission).

If we look back 300 years, knowledge about the plants you could and couldn’t eat was absolutely essential to survival. Some women possessed such a startling botanical arsenal that they were accused of witchcraft — something which many of them paid for with their lives. Sadly, with the rise of farming, when we started domesticating crops, and more recently supermarkets, this communal knowledge has since been mostly lost, with the exception of a few individuals.

As he leads us on a two hour walk around the grounds of Bovey Castle, a Grade II-listed early 20th-century mansion, Thomas points out the various plants we can gather and tells us about some of their uses. Elderflower is in season at the moment, and can be used to make cordial, flavoured gin or even elderflower wine. ‘But best use plastic bottles, as it does have a propensity to explode,’ Thomas says, detailing a particularly gory incident when a friend of his used glass bottles which, when one exploded, took his eye out.

Wild garlic is another useful ingredient in the foragers pantry, as is pink purslane, mint, navelwort, Jack-by-the-hedge and cleavers (otherwise known, amusingly, as ‘sticky willy’ — they make a brilliant diuretic that tastes of cucumber when left to soak in water overnight, apparently). Nettles, as long as they are pulled out with a glove to avoid stinging, make excellent nettle soup or beer.

The main thing that puts people off foraging, says Thomas, are ‘lookalikes’. Mushrooms are a prime example. We all, I’m sure, love the idea of cheffing up some self-foraged chanterelles on toast for supper as much as the next person, but many of us remember all too well reading a news story detailing someone’s death after accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom.

When it comes to lookalikes, Thomas never tastes the risk. As he puts it: ‘If you're going to die for something, don’t let it be salad.’ In Dartmoor, hemlock is the most common dangerous plant and can easily be confused with the totally benign cow parsley. Well known as the poison that killed Socrates, the innocuously-delicate white flowers of the plant bloom in clusters by bodies of water. If ingested, the alkaloids in the plant slowly poison the nerve-muscle junctions and cause the failure of the breathing muscles. Thomas aptly, but awfully, describes this as ‘a meat coffin that lasts hours’. We see plenty of it on our walk and I make sure to keep a healthy distance.

Despite the less than appetising description above, the trip did stoke my appetite for foraging. As long as you steer clear of those deadly lookalikes, it’s a healthy and interesting way to reconnect with nature and snaffle up some free grub while you’re at it. Plus the two-hour walk made sure I was ravenous for anything (but hemlock) once we were back in the hotel restaurant.

Booking for The Wild Larder: A Foraging Walk & Lunch with Thomas Radford is open now. Upcoming sessions at PoB Hotels include Thurlestone Hotel, Devon, on June 26 and Calcot & Spa, the Cotswolds, on June 30.

It was at Tigh na Coille, a secluded cottage on a Highland hillside overlooking Loch Ness, that I idly flipped open a well-placed copy of A Place In Scotland, a 2024 interiors volume by designer Banjo Beale and photographer Alexander Baxter, and spied its opening statement. ‘Something is happening,’ claimed Beale. ‘A new confidence — and inspiring new voices — are redefining what Scottish style really is.’ ‘Well, quite,’ I thought, surveying the elevated Scandi-chic stylings around me courtesy of WildLand, the pioneering conservation-meets-hospitality group whose sprawling Aldourie estate we were at the edge of. If not quite new, WildLand can most definitely lay claim to being one of Scotland’s most inspiring voices.

I’ve been a regular visitor to the Highlands since 2012. Glance up at my byline above and you’ll spot an unmistakably Scottish surname; its roots are up here and I suppose the clan lands spoke to me. In fact, they quickly became my favourite place on Earth. Yet the idea that ‘something is happening’ was one that had been percolating only on recent visits and here Beale had laid it bare in print.

Natural beauty apart, the allure of the Highlands is its unhurried pace. It’s a place where things unfold rather than arrive. Photographer Robbie Lawrence spent five years photographing Highland gatherings for a book called Long Walk Home, recruiting decorated Scottish poet John Burnside to write its introduction. ‘Scottishness itself is as much myth as it is history,’ said Burnside. ‘Myths let us roam, they make space for the imagination, for reinvention…’ It might not be the imagined backdrop to the modern notion of relentless ‘creativity’, but innovation trickles like spring water here if you look closely enough.

Benjamin Morgan agrees. Morgan is a creative producer at Wild Gorse, a Belladrum-based fine art floristry studio that has styled everything from fashion events to Vogue-splashed weddings. ‘The Highlands is steeped in craftsmanship,’ he says. ‘We’re surrounded by an abundance of inspiration. There is space to be creative.’

Whisky, of course, has long been the most well-known canvas for creativity in the Highlands — its fans making pilgrimages to sample it at source; its bottles exported to every corner of the globe. Recent years, however, have seen a palpable acceleration among the big luxury-backed players. The theatrical Russell Sage makeover of Ardbeg House on Islay, the tasteful grassy Teletubbies domes installed at The Macallan’s unconventional Craigellachie headquarters, the Harrison Ford-fronted reboot of Glenmorangie are all cases in point.

Then there is WildLand. The brainchild of Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen and his wife, Anne, it began as a conservation project in 2006, acquiring swathes of land with a bold 200-year vision to restore them ‘to their former magnificent natural state and repair the harm that man has inflicted on them’. The hospitality arm exists to help both fund that vision and educate guests on the reasons behind it. For instance, Povlsen had spent much of his childhood exploring the Glenfeshie estate in the Cairngorms and it had made a lasting impression. It was the first piece of land they purchased (the Povlsens, with 1%, are now Scotland’s biggest private landowners) and, aptly, where I began my WildLand tour.

Head naturalist Steve Liddle led the charge, first through the fords of the Feshie river in a Land Rover and then on foot, past the backdrop of rolling Munros that inspired Edwin Landseer to paint The Monarch of the Glen here in 1851. The quickly rattled-off stats caused jaws to drop: more than 6.5 million trees have been hand planted since 2014, the treeline rejuvenated to a level not seen in more than a century. A zero-tolerance policy on sapling-hungry deer has seen an average of 25 per square kilometre reduced to only two. Young deerstalker Finlay Davidson jokes about the notorious summer midges putting him off his aim, but insists on ‘taking every precaution to get a clean shot’. (In a newly agreed scheme, the resulting venison gets delivered to local schools.)

As old fencing has been torn down around the estate, Liddle’s conservation team has grown; 40 of them — Davidson included — now work on deer management, peatland preservation, mapping an extensive biodiversity index and conducting wildlife-impact assessments. (‘First, there’s habitat restoration, then there’s species return,’ explains Liddle, referring to the likes of raptors, beavers and wildcats — lynx are mooted to follow.) At one point, we stopped at a stream and were encouraged to drink the straight-from-the-mountain water. If these lands have inspired creativity in others, here the simple creativity of the land itself is given centre stage.

The next WildLand estate lay three hours north in Sutherland, proudly known as Scotland’s least-explored region, where the Highlands relax into an even more widescreen aspect ratio. Here, the seven-bedroom Kinloch Lodge and Kyle-of-Tongue-view Lundies House take up prime positions at the very tip of our isles, bathed, as I arrived, in late-evening, near-Arctic-Circle sun. That redefined Scottish style heralded by Beale is particularly present here owing to the work of Ruth Kramer, WildLand’s director of concept and design, who cites the stories and exhibits of the Highland Folk Museum and the ‘unhurried nature’ of the local area as inspiration for her relaxed, textural take on Scandi-Scottish fusion. A dreamscape wallpaper in its dining room and artist Claire Basler’s floral mural in my room, Isla, add a sense of flair to Lundies in particular. Nearby, WildLand has had a hand in resurrecting a local bakehouse and store, Burr’s of Tongue, a gathering spot for locals between trips down to the beach.

Further east, at the tip of Loch Hope, sits WildLand’s most ambitious project yet, Hope, a decade in the making and now, finally, open. Part hotel, part activity centre, part Scottish safari lodge — it’s so impressive in scope it almost defies description.

Even seeing it in its unfinished, undressed state, it was clear that this will be an opening to truly test Sutherland’s ‘least-explored’ claim. As the gateway to 114,000 acres of beach, hills, loch and woodland, not to mention its pole position on the fabled NC500 route, its crowd-pulling potential warranted some extraordinary attention to detail. Each of its external and internal wooden planks, for example, was chosen personally by Povlsen and nailed into place. Every stone-carved shower tray took 150 hours to fashion by hand. Some 225 miles of drystone wall have been erected in the area.

Before flitting back to the shores of Loch Ness for a final night in the comfort of Aldourie Castle, WildLand’s most overtly opulent stay, I stared out at Ben Hope as work on the lodge continued around me. ‘Something really is happening,’ I thought.

WildLand’s self-catering cottages start from £275 per night; hotels from £525 per night, on a full-board basis; and exclusive-use properties from £3,000 per night, on a full-board basis with an in-house chef and conservation-led experiences.

Rooms at Hope start from £1,100 per night, on a full-board basis, and include guided daily experiences and access to outdoor equipment.

Visit the website for more information and to book.

This feature originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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The Vaults at Stow

The Vaults at Stow deliciously upends the normal routine of things when it comes to a stay in the Cotswolds (the check-in desk routine of a hotel; the left-to-your-own-devices experience of an Airbnb; the general din that’s part and parcel of a room above a pub). Here, everything is quiet at night, except the church bells solemnly ringing out the hour, and you can slip in without a squeak of a conversation, by unlocking the door to one of the three very smart apartments with a secret code.

Husband-and-wife team Rory and India Hunter have overseen a masterful reimagining of the upper floors of an old Barclays Bank, done in the best way. It is like a home away from home, the pied-à-terre of a deeply stylish friend, instead of bland hotel renovation. The design notes are all very on point: Ottoline de Vries and Penny Morrison fabrics, Hum Fleming cosmic lampshades and Edward Bulmer paint in buttery yellow, plaster pink and sage green.

Everything about the set-up says: ‘Come in and make yourself at home.’ On an antique Welsh dresser, there’s a chess set and dominos. Under the bedside table, there’s a considered and diverse selection of books from The Best of Betjeman to Brian Cox’s Human Universe. In the fridge, cans of Dash and Trip sit next to bottles of La Vieille Ferme rosé and on the kitchen counter you’ll find a just-baked sourdough loaf, a jug of verdant tulips and a bowl of crunchy Granny Smiths. A marbled visitors’ book sits by the door, filled with love letters from previous guests.

Sash windows that close with a satisfying swoosh look out over the square at the front and, to the back, terraces have widescreen views of moss-covered rooftops, chimneys puffing out curls of woodsmoke and early-morning mist rolling off the surrounding hills.

The Vaults is plum in the middle of everything you might want to see and do here: gallery pottering at Red Rag and Stow Art House, picking up paints at Cotswolds Art Supplies, stationery browsing at Phyra Studio, choosing coloured tea towels and candles from Domestic Science and tasting pastel-speckled gull’s-egg treats from the Cotswolds Chocolate Company. Don’t miss the Crock Shop, either, a tardis-like emporium of kitchen kit you never knew you needed.

Rooms at The Vaults at Stow start from £260 per night. There is a two-night minimum stay. Visit their website for more information and to book.

Need to know

The history book of Stow-on-the-Wold reads like a gripping page-turner. The town sits on the site of an Iron Age fort that caught the eye of the invading Romans, who used it as a handy stopping point on their ruler-straight Fosse Way. Stow as we know it, arranged about the main square, took shape in the 11th century courtesy of Henry I, who granted a licence for a weekly market.

Sheep — tens of thousands of them — soon followed, zigzagging through narrow lanes to the square, which had become an important hub for the medieval wool trade. St Edwards Church was consecrated in the 10th century, but changes to the structure and interior decoration were made up until the 19th, shortly before J. R. R. Tolkien’s rumoured visit.

Local legend has it that the church’s famous yew-tree framed entrance inspired the Doors of Durin in the author’s seminal work, The Lord of the Rings.

It’s not hard to understand why Stow-on-the-Wold has been such a prominent town for so many centuries: it’s the highest town in the Cotswolds, a long-standing gathering place for hungry travellers and a melting pot of prosperous small businesses.

A word of warning: do not misbehave here. The remains of 15th-century penal stocks still stand on the green, not far from Digbeth Street, where the road was said to have run red with blood during the final battle of the English Civil War, in 1646.

Where to eat

• In the morning, join the queue at Otis & Belle in Talbot Court, less than a minute’s walk from The Vaults, where locals scoop up sticky cinnamon rolls and flat whites and compare notes on the weather
• For in-apartment lunches, try the deli counter at D’Ambrosi Fine Foods, where the counters are piled high with delicious salads, soups and shrimp rolls
• Bar Foletta boasts an enviable atmosphere. Perello olives, serrano and manchego croquettes, pints of Hawkstone and wicked, salt-rimmed margaritas are served to a soundtrack of vinyl records
• There are plenty of pubs in Stow, as well as a craft beer café and bottleshop Off the Square, and, three miles away, the Daylesford-owned The Fox at Oddington is delightful, run by an endlessly cheerful, young team

What to do while you’re there

• Walks All the best walks are loops. For a quick circular trot, the route between the pretty sisters of Lower and Upper Slaughter is a great pre-lunch warm up. It’s even better if you start out from Stow-on-the-Wold directly
• Viewpoints If the views from The Vaults at Stow whet your appetite, hotfoot it to Capability Brown’s Broadway Tower folly — the second-highest point in the Cotswolds. On a clear day, you can see for more than 60 miles
• Architecture Another brilliant folly, the neo-Mughal Sezincote House was built for Col John Cockerell at the turn of the 19th century to remind him of his time serving in the East India Company
• Visit Daylesford’s flagship shop is always worth a peek, if only to marvel at the sheer scale of the place, the foot-long trays of rhubarb and rainbow-colour heirloom tomatoes, shelves of homeware as far as the eye can see and restaurants at every turn

This feature originally appeared in the April 30, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

Evolving from more basic fortifications like hill forts, castles first appeared in Europe around the 9th century. William the Conqueror started building them in Britain after the Norman Conquest, and over the following 150 years the Normans built more than 1000 in England and Wales, first from wood and later using stone.

It wasn’t until the 12th century that castles began to be built in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and luckily for us endless ancient skirmishes means that today the UK is simply brimming with beautiful castles. Fortunately, some of them are available as holiday accommodation, either converted into characterful hotels or as self-catering holiday homes.

The opportunity to wander the beautiful courtyards and idyllic surroundings of a stunning castle steeped in history makes for a perfect romantic break, and a family holiday at an historic fortress is hard to beat too, where children can run riot, revelling in life as a medieval lord or lady.

Northern Ireland

Crom Castle, Co Fermanagh

When, some years ago, I stayed in the west wing of this magnificent fairytale castle built in 1840, Henry Crichton, 6th Earl Erne (who is sadly no longer with us), and his wife, Countess Erne, dropped in for tea. This is the kind of experience you don’t get while staying at a Travelodge.

The estate is now managed by the National Trust, and the castle owned by John Crichton, the 7th Earl Erne. Once the family owned far more land. I remember asking John’s father how big the estate used to be. ‘It extended almost to Dublin at one point,’ he replied, rather matter-of-factly. He may have been joking somewhat, but in the late 19th century his family was certainly one of the biggest landowners in Ireland.

Crom Estate is stunningly beautiful and unspoilt. You can walk in complete tranquility through 1,900 acres of rolling parkland, oak woodland and along the shores of Lough Erne past numerous fine old buildings and ruins, including the original castle dating from 1611, now a ruin. Or, you can jump on a boat and explore the islands on the lake. The Estate was also a location for the BBC television series Blandings, based on the works of P.G. Wodehouse.

The castle is luxurious and adorned with antique furniture and pictures, including imposing oil paintings of Erne ancestors. The west wing sleeps up to 12 people and the entire property can be rented, and those without considerably large wallets can also rent cottages from the National Trust on the Estate, and camp in the grounds.

For Crom Castle stays see Loyd and Townsend Rose’s and National Trust Holidays’ website.

Scotland

Castle Fraser, Aberdeenshire

Built between 1575 and 1636, but with parts dating back to the 1450s, Castle Fraser — one of Scotland’s largest tower houses — is an excellent example of Scottish Baronial architecture.

You can stay in its two-bedroom apartment in the east wing overlooking the grounds and castle courtyard. However, apart from the domed ceiling, the modern and rather plain interior design means that there are not many clues as to its history.

Luckily, much of the castle elsewhere (open to the public) retains many original features. There is a medieval Great Hall and elegant Victorian bedrooms installed with four-posters, and quirky features such as hidden trapdoors and secret staircases. There are numerous intricately-carved stone armorial crests, family treasures and portraits, and if you climb the round tower you are rewarded with wonderful views.

The extensive grounds include a traditional walled garden and estate trails where it is possible to spot red squirrels, roe deer, buzzards and dragonflies.

For Castle Fraser stays see the National Trust for Scotland’s website.

Bothwick Castle, Lothian

Built in 1430 and situated just 12 miles from Edinburgh in the heart of the beautiful Midlothian countryside, Borthwick was the refuge of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567, and Sir Walter Scott also visited. It still bears the scars of being besieged by Oliver Cromwell, its magnificent twin towers standing 100 feet high from dungeons to battlements.

The elegantly-proportioned State Room boasts beautifully arched windows and tapestries and guests can dine in the candlelit Great Hall. Impressive original features abound, including stone vaulted ceilings, spiral staircases, chandeliers, large medieval chimney breasts and magnificent medieval fireplaces.

The very comfortable bedrooms have walls of exposed stone or wood panelling and are decked out with luxurious fabrics, carved-oak beds and antique furniture. One has a medieval ceiling mural, another a painting by Uccello of the Battle of San Romano, one of the earliest examples of the use of perspective in Renaissance art.

For Borthwick Castle stays see Celtic Castles’ website.

Saddell Castle, Argyll and Bute

This splendid 16th century four-storey tower house with comfortable accommodation for eight people sits right on the beach, on the sheltered, western side of the Mull of Kintyre and facing the Killbrannan Sound and Isle of Arran. Probably completed in around 1612, it has some fine touches such as a decorated ceiling, panelling, carved stone panels, and a battlemented wall-walk around the roof. The windows embedded in the thick stone walls look out onto fabulous countryside and Saddell Bay, where sea birds, otters and even basking sharks can be seen near the deserted beach.

For Saddell Castle stays see The Landmark Trust’s website.

Wales

Ruthin Castle, Denbighshire

The first documented castle on this site in the Vale of Clwyd was built for Edward I in 1277 but was destroyed during the English Civil War in 1646. Part of the ruins were incorporated into the large castellated mansion built in its place in the mid-19th century that exists today.

Ruthin Castle has had a dramatic history, including withstanding an 11-week siege during the Civil War, and the imprisonment and torture of the Welsh poet Richard Gwyn, who was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1584. In Edwardian times visitors included the Prince of Wales, actress Lillie Langtry, and Lady Randolph Churchill.

Some striking features remain, such as its medieval sandstone-dressed masonry capped by Victorian rough-cut limestone, and a huge Victorian stone carved fireplace. It is now a hotel set within gardens and sprawling woodland, and although its rooms do not convey a medieval atmosphere, occasional medieval banquets are held where guests can quaff wine from pewter goblets and mead from clay cups and eat in medieval style with a dagger.

For Ruthin Castle stays see the castle’s website.

England

Leeds Castle, Kent

Situated five miles southeast of Maidstone, Leeds Castle has a rich history, with residents and owners including Edward I and II, Henry VIII, and six queens including Eleanor, Isabella and Catherine of Aragon. In the 1920s it became a glamorous country house retreat for Anglo-American heiress Lady Olive Baillie, who hosted stars like Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn and Cary Grant.

The castle is now a major historical tourist attraction and receives more than 600,000 visitors each year. As well as some pretty walks, there are numerous attractions in the extensive grounds including a challenging maze and underground grotto (dating from the 1980s), a birds of prey centre and a children’s play areas.

It has had many changes over the years. Initially a manor house listed in the Domesday Survey of 1086, the first stone castle was built in 1119, later enlarged and improved, becoming a Tudor palace. In 1823 a new castle was built in Tudor style because the original was in such a ruined condition. It is possible to stay in a variety of castle bedrooms and buildings on the estate.

For Leeds Castle stays see their website.

Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire

When Thornbury Castle was completed in 1521, Henry VIII promptly beheaded its owner, Edward Stafford, the 3rd Duke of Buckingham, and took ownership. He stayed here with Ann Boleyn, the castle then passing through the hands of his children, Edward VI and Mary I, once he had died.

Surrounded by walled Tudor gardens with views over the River Severn into Gloucestershire and Wales, it has thankfully been upgraded since those times and now has a fine restaurant and 26 extremely comfortable bedchambers, one having the largest four-poster bed in Britain, at an impressive 10 feet wide.

Numerous original features such as four-foot walls with crenellations, arrow slits and ornate oriel windows, mighty oak-panelled doors and grand stone Tudor fireplaces feature throughout.

For Thornbury Castle stays see their website.

Kingswear Castle, Devon

This pretty artillery fort built to defend the harbour at the mouth of the River Dart at Dartmouth sleeps four. Perched on the water’s edge, from the windows you can look across to Dartmouth or down the craggy coast and pine forests, or simply watch the boats go by. At night you can stand on the battlements watching the stars. The square three-storey tower is owned by The Landmark Trust, which has painstakingly restored the castle’s ground floor to look as it did when it was completed in 1502.

The castle was constructed using slate rubble, with detailing using red sandstone ashlar. Numerous original features, both Tudor and from the Victorian renovation, remain, such as exposed stone walls and elegant wooden doors.

The accommodation is smart but unfussy. One bedroom is located 50 feet away in a blockhouse built in World War II, ideal if you have fractious kids or troublesome guests.

For Kingswear Castle stays see The Landmark Trust’s website.

Chillingham Castle, Northumberland

Nestled in beautiful, secluded countryside near the attractive rural town of Wooler, this remarkable castle, complete with dungeons, state rooms, a banqueting hall and torture chamber, has been in the same family, the Earl Greys and their relations, since 1246.

You can tour the castle or stay in one of the apartments from April to November. Apartments have some impressive antiques, and one is situated at the top of a look-out tower, another has a panelled and beamed Elizabethan long gallery, and a further room has works by Victorian painter Sir Edwin Landseer, a frequent visitor to the castle.

There's a tea room, lawns, gardens and wonderful woodland too. Chillingham Park contains the world’s only surviving true wild herd of cattle, which once roamed the forests of Britain.

For Chillingham Castle stays see their website.

Snape Castle, North Yorkshire

Three miles from pleasant market town Bedale, this 15th century castle has, unsurprisingly, a rich history. Previous residents include Queen Anne and in January 1537, a mob stormed the castle and took Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's sixth wife, and her two stepchildren hostage.

Although you can admire its imposing structure, the castle itself is closed to the public. However, it is possible to stay in cottage-style accommodation in the undercroft beneath the castle’s 15th century chapel. It is comfortable rather than luxurious and features a spacious open plan sitting, dining and well-equipped kitchen area.

For Snape Castle stays see Sykes Holiday Cottage’s website.

Hero hotel

Three Mile Beach

Cornwall, the land of saints, is divided into two different types of devotees or Kernowphiles: those that love the north with its beaches and surfing (my wife, Rachel’s, family) and those who prefer the south for its gardens and peace (me). It’s Padstow versus St Mawes. In November, Rachel drove a bit further down the A30 than normal to Gwithian Beach, as I took one of the most beautiful train journeys in Britain to St Erth, before we joined up to stay at Three Mile Beach. Here, at the toe end of Cornwall, both points of the compass are so close that you can walk from one side of the county to the other in an afternoon. There is no need for a north-south divide.

We stayed in one of the 19 beach huts with Tiger (a dog bed is supplied, as is just about everything else you could imagine you might need). Each hut has a New England-meets-Poldark feel, sumptuously kitted out with a woodburning stove, mini Everhot cooker and the types of natural products that put a big smile on Rachel’s face. Outside, in the tightly fenced, slightly claustrophobic courtyard is a hot tub, sauna and barbecue, where one evening we made pizzas from the kit left for us on arrival.

This is a place for a romantic escape, avoiding all the intrusion that hotels bring. You can, of course, order delicious food to be delivered or cook your own. It is the best of both worlds: you can have as much service or solitude as you like. There are surf schools to join or massages to enjoy for those seeking relaxation. Whatever your penchant, you will feel renewed by the peace and sea air.

A two-bedroom beach shack at Three Mile Beach costs £600 for a three-night stay. Visit their website for more information and to book.

Need to know

There was no view of the sea from our room, which was a great shame, as the sea is so close that we could hear it. It is, however, a paradise for children and dogs. There are wonderful walks — the hotel lies on the South West Coast Path — in every direction from the hotel. You could spend the whole week setting off in different directions and never repeat a step. The hotel provides an exceptionally well-produced book listing all the local activities and directions. There is also the possibility of being picked up by the staff from a nearby station, but, to get the best out of a stay here, you really need a car.

The area has a proud mining heritage; tin and copper were dug from the earth. There is no mining today, but the remnants of this once-great industry are still visible as chimneys rising above the abandoned sunken shafts. There are Bronze Age remains to be found in the sand dunes and ancient Celtic chapels around the village of Gwithian; nature reserves abound for ornithologists — guillemots, razorbills and cormorants nest locally — and the striking Godrevy Light-house that inspired Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse stands proud at the eastern end of the beach. If you are very lucky, you may see dolphins in the bay; you are almost guaranteed to see seals.

Where to eat

Cafés abound in the area, but we particularly enjoyed Godrevy Café after a morning walk for breakfast. Lots of things are home-made, including the lemon curd. Go upstairs for the best views of the sea and choose the bacon sandwich.

You cannot better Carbis Bay Hotel for a full-on, Cornish afternoon tea with panoramic views of St Ives Bay and we enjoyed the simple, fresh, cheerful pub food at The Old Forge, Lelant.

What to do while you’re there

• Surf The sea here is good for all abilities. When we were there, the waves, pulled inexorably bigger by the full moon, lured many locals from their beds at dawn
• Walk There’s a truly exceptional offering of beach walks on golden sand, historic walks around the old tin and copper mines and pub treks, all while taking in the freshest air and admiring the wildlife, from murmurations of starlings to singing oystercatchers
• St Ives Founded in the 5th century by an Irish monk, the pretty town (above) has a rich history of fishing, mining and, more recently, art, with artists drawn to the particular light reflected from the water onto the sands. Visit Tate and the Barbara Hepworth Museum
• Visit The Lizard, the southernmost point of the British mainland; Mousehole for cobbled streets, its harbour and charming granite cottages; The Minack for its world-famous open-air theatre built into the cliffside; and the tidal island St Michael’s Mount, the English counterpart of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy

Though Britain trails behind the Continent when it comes to the number of dog-friendly hotels (surprising, really, given how pro-dog we are), things have, in recent years, been changing for the better — driven by the staycation’s enduring popularity.

So, in honour of the furry friends I don’t want you to have to leave behind, here are a few of my — and my dachshund Geoffrey’s — favourite places to stay that welcome dogs with open arms, water bowls and plenty of treats.

The Gallivant, East Sussex

You’ll find The Gallivant, a single storey property, a pebble’s throw from the beaches of Camber Sands (literally, if you have a good arm). It has cosy rooms and charming service for you and your dog and is perfectly positioned for anyone who wants to visit the ever-popular town of Rye, as well as the beach.

One of its main attractions is the food — which is homely and delicious. At tea time, feast on complimentary cake, including homemade Victoria sponge and banana blondies in the Christopher Farr-covered snug.

Afterwards, I would suggest moving to the sun-drenched (one can hope) patio for a glass of local wine or Kent’s finest sparkling rosé (if you go at 5pm, it’s also on the house).

If you want to bring your four-legged friend to supper you’ll be seated in the bar area — which, to be honest, feels exactly like the restaurant that’s housed in the orangery, the other side of a pane of glass, and serves the same menu. Though the hotel is dog friendly all year round, not all of the beaches are, so it’s worth checking online you head out on your morning walk.

Rooms from £165 a night.

11 Cadogan Gardens, London

The King’s Road in Chelsea is arguably one of London’s most dog-friendly shopping streets (Peter Jones could double as a Crufts arena on a Saturday afternoon), so if you’re looking for somewhere to stay in the capital, this converted townhouse, tucked behind Sloane Square, is a great option.

Your plush room comes with a plush toy for your canine friend, plus venison bites (again, for the dog). And they’re allowed in all areas of the property, including TK restaurant which backs onto bustling Pavilion Road and serves a punchy strawberry martini.

There is a doggie weight cap, so if yours is creeping past the 15kg limit maybe lay off the treats pre-visit.

Petite double rooms from £422 a night.

Hotel Tresanton, Cornwall

It feels wrong to holiday on the shores of Cornwall without a dog with its expanses of beaches for them to zoom around on. So thank god for places such as Tresanton that make the situation easier — and more luxurious — for all parties.

The original part of the hotel dates back to 1760, when it was a sailing club, but things have grown exponentially since then with the owners buying up and renovating the homes surrounding it. Throughout, old charm is balanced with contemporary design to help create a sense of necessary cohesion and timelessness.

True to its location you can enjoy an excellent Cornish clotted cream-loaded afternoon tea on the harbour-view terrace, served by dutiful and smiley young staff in buttoned up white jackets — who will also bring a plate of cheesy biscuits from the local bakery for your dog if they ask nicely.

When the sun shines, hop over the road to the Beach Club, a French Riviera-style, sun lounger-filled al fresco restaurant serving local beer, cocktails, burgers and crab salads. If rain stops play — as it is sometimes want to do — there’s the hotel’s Dog’s Bar, a snug little canine-themed pub at the foot of the building.

The only place reserved entirely for humans is the main dining room, but after all the excitement of beach zoomies and snazzy sunset drinks your dog will probably be grateful for a little in-room alone time.

Rooms from £330 a night on a bed and breakfast basis.

Hotel Endsleigh, Devon

Once the home of Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford (1781-1853), Endsleigh opened as a hotel and garden in 2004 — and quickly gained a reputation as one of the finest hotels in Devon.

The grounds alone are worthy of a visit; lush and incredibly well maintained with grottos, waterfalls and an arboretum studded with towering Sequoia trees. Dogs are welcome, too.

The property is also famed for its trout and salmon fishing because a stretch of the Tamar runs right through it (and demarks the Devon-Cornwall border). However, if fishing isn’t your thing, you can watch the anglers — cocktail in hand — while playing badminton or croquet on the lawn which boasts outstanding views of the valley and beyond.

In your room you’ll find a sweet set up for your dog: treats, a towel to mop up muddy underbellies and a cosy bed for them to curl up in while you enjoy a supper of local venison haunch and intricate puddings in the hotel’s lauded fine-dining restaurant.

Rooms from £280 a night on a bed and breakfast basis.

Four Seasons Hampshire

This Hampshire hotel is famously child friendly and family, in my books and theirs, includes dogs. As such, they’re allowed in all of the bedrooms and will get to sleep on a bouncy Four Seasons-branded bed of their own. Packs of Lily’s Kitchen food and bottled water (only the best for your fur-child) are also included.

There are 300 acres of beautiful grounds to explore, from walled gardens to shooting grounds (best to avoid those on your dog walks, mind), but not all of the dining areas are dog-friendly. However, there is a large bar area adjoining Wild Carrot, their fine dining restaurant, that you can bring them into, so you don’t feel shunned into a corner due to your canine companion’s presence (if anything you may even prefer the cosy and casual setting). There you can order from the restaurant’s menu or the bar one, and don’t skip breakfast. It’s a true highlight: think local sausages, golden honeycomb sourced from the garden’s hives and, if you’re celebrating/on holiday/living a little, unlimited English sparkling wine from Hattingley.

Garden Rooms from £595 a night.

We had time to kill the other day on the long drive north from London to Edinburgh, so we detoured via Durham to revisit the cathedral there. I am neither a great churchgoer, nor a great architectural historian, but, as I suspect many do, I experience a humbling sense of awe in the religious bastions of our blessed isle.

Once, on a day-long walk in the company of Dr Guy Hayward of the British Pilgrimage Trust, I found myself marvelling at the exquisite medieval stained-glass windows in Great Malvern Priory, prostrating my body in submission against the north wall of the pretty country church in Powick and holding back the tears as Guy sang an ancient Anglo-Saxon chant to St Wulfstan in the crypt of Worcester Cathedral. It was strange and stirring stuff — particularly for an agnostic such as me — falling only just short of the same profound wonder that always envelops me on entering Durham Cathedral. This monumental building, started in 1093, six years after the death of William the Conqueror, is perhaps the greatest of all Norman architectural legacies in England, the scale and solidity of its massive structure (quite apart from the detail within) a formidable message of control from the country’s new dynasty.

My detour to Durham, however, had also been prompted by a trip a few weeks before to Sicily’s great capital, Palermo — an unlikely pairing of cities sharing an unlikely historical overlap. As William was busy flinging arrows around in Hastings and beyond, another Norman conquest was taking place in Sicily, this one at the hands of Roger, a distant cousin of William’s from the same Norman lineage.

After battling away for 30 years between 1061 and 1091, Roger finally defeated Sicily’s Muslim rulers and was declared the island’s first Grand Count, passing this mantle on in due course to his son, Roger number two, who, in 1130, was finally crowned King of Sicily. A couple of years later, as work on Durham Cathedral was nearing completion, Roger II gave the go-ahead for the construction of the Capella Palatina, a private chapel within Palermo’s aptly named Palazzo dei Normanni, the oldest royal residence in Europe.

The Norman conquerors could not have presided over two more different kingdoms or ruled in more different ways. William took the brute-force route, establishing himself as a ruthless commander, flexing his military might at every opportunity and cutting no slack for the poor Anglo-Saxons he had conquered. Roger II, meanwhile, aesthete and intellectual, embraced Sicily’s multicultural population and promoted religious tolerance among his predominantly Muslim, Christian and Jewish subjects. Certainly, standing within the Chapel’s glittering, gold interior, it is hard to imagine that, as the Crusades were raging the length and breadth of the Levant, here in Sicily Christians and Muslims were living and working together in harmony.

Like the men, so, too, their architectural legacies: Durham’s Norman masterpiece and Palermo’s Arab-Norman extravaganza could not encapsulate the gulf between these two strands of the same family more precisely. On the one hand, a majestic, Romanesque behemoth, its mighty, chevron-striped columns and ribbed stone vaulting pioneering the best of north European engineering; on the other, an intimate, Mediterranean jewel box elaborately fusing three great civilisations under one roof in the gold mosaics of Byzantium, the Arabic carvings of Islam and the storytelling of Christianity. Stylistically worlds apart yet both, in their own way, symbols of the power of their Norman conquerors.

This feature originally appeared in the January 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sopwell House has few faults. It’s ideally located in the greenery of St Albans, Hertfordshire — a charming cathedral city — and easily accessible from London on the trusty Thameslink, which gives it two big green ticks in my book. I checked in for a girls’ weekend with my step-mother for some much needed R&R before Christmas.

The rooms

Our room was clean and spacious — albeit rather close to the car park. With a magnificent-looking bath in the en suite that I sadly didn’t get enough time to use, a gloriously cosy bed and an ample dressing table, it was hard to find fault. An outdoor seating area attached would have been the perfect place to sit and catch up, or simply watch the world go by with a cup of tea, had the world not been a chilly 2ºC during our stay. The complimentary macaroons went down very easily, as did the complimentary bottle of gin, which came with tonic and grapefruit slices. This was a thoughtful touch and made for the perfect getting-ready drinks as we chose our outfits and put on our make up before going down for dinner that evening.

Eating and drinking

There are two restaurants to choose from at Sopwell House, The more traditional option, The Brasserie, or Omboo — an asian fusion offering. Having had enough Asian-fusion food to last me a lifetime in recent weeks (it seems to be the thing that’s trendy right now) we opted for the Brasserie. I had scallops in butter and garlic to start and my dinner-partner had the smoked salmon: both utterly enjoyable. For my main I had a steak, and polished off with a further gin and tonic for good measure. The food was very good, but there was nothing on the menu to write home about. However, Sopwell House is a spa hotel, not a fine-dining one, so this was to be expected, and we enjoyed a very tasty meal.

How they’ll keep you busy

The spa — the main reason to stay at Sopwell House. There are two options to choose from: The Cottonmill spa and The Club at Cottonmill. The latter is an option worth paying extra for. It comes with a superior steam room, sauna, plenty of indoor space to relax and, the pièce de résistance, the outdoor amenities, which you cannot access if you are only visiting the Cottonmill spa. The highlight of my visit was enjoying a cup of orange blossom tea in an outdoor jacuzzi, which we had all to ourselves, as the stars shone above us. However, this was marred slightly when ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ was blasted out into the cool night air, breaking the previous calm of the gentle spa tunes. It took a bit of an auditory sledgehammer to our zen vibes, truth be told. Also marring the vibes: the wristbands we needed to get into the outdoor, more exclusive, part of the spa. Regular wristbands deny you entry at the door, making for a somewhat awkward experience if you’ve not paid the extra fee, and the unwanted rubber bangle is reminiscent of a tacky all-inclusive — distinctly not chic. It also implies a certain mistrust of the hotel guests. Most law-abiding visitors would, surely, stick to the part they have paid for. Otherwise it was magical.

What else to do while you’re there

Visit St Albans Cathedral. When we went, a local choir was rehearsing for a carol concert, which lent the experience a magical quality in the way that only voices joined in song, and amplified by a certain kind of acoustics, can. The building itself was very impressive (and I say that as someone who hails from Canterbury, which in my mind is home to the final boss of English cathedrals). It was free to visit and the guides were extremely helpful and pointed out all sorts of quirks and oddities as we looked around. For example, one of the shrines that was reconstructed in 2020 has a masked figure that was added as a tribute to the pandemic era, which you can spy if you look closely in the right place. Well worth a trip.

Who’s it for

The girls.

What gives it the wow factor

Swimming into the outdoor pool at night and stargazing from one of the surrounding jacuzzis.

The one thing we’d change

Apart from the wristbands and the playlist — easily fixed — the milk in our room was long life. Although there was a sign informing us that we could ring down to reception to have some fresh milk brought up, given we had a mini fridge I think it would have been nicer if it had been included from the off. But that really is me being incredibly picky.

Insider tip

Order breakfast to be delivered to your room in the morning — the ultimate luxury lie-in.

For more information on Sopwell House, and to book a room, see their website.

In an influential 2016 essay entitled Welcome to AirSpace, the American cultural critic Kyle Chayka defined a look which has become so prolific in hospitality that it’s led to a global march of coffee shops, co-working spaces and restaurants ‘that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go’. When it comes to hotels I’m sure you can picture the sort I mean: reclaimed industrial spaces with poured concrete floors or parquet, lots of plants, terrazzo bathrooms, Eames-adjacent chairs and a smattering of jewel-toned crushed velvet. Oh, and super-fast WiFi, the better to document your stay on social media.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this — it’s a package I’ve sought out in various cities over the years when travelling for work, precisely because you know what you’re getting. But it keeps you in a bubble: however many miles you are from home it can feel as though you haven’t really gone anywhere at all. As Kyle puts it, ‘as the geography of AirSpace spreads, so does a certain sameness’ — for all its comfort and convenience, this algorithmically codified aesthetic is making getaways (whisper it) a bit boring. Basic, even.

Thank goodness, then, for the Seaside Boarding House, a converted Edwardian villa overlooking Chesil Beach that’s a real breath of fresh (sea) air. Certainly it’s stylish, with its reclaimed wooden floors, crisp organic bedding and walls painted in seafoam shades. The bar will do you a textbook flat white, and your negroni will come with a modish bowl of Perello olives. But said cocktail is brought to you in a proper drawing room, with a crackling fire surrounded by shelves stocked with the likes of Anthony Powell and local boy Thomas Hardy. The ceiling lights are brass pre-war originals, the bannisters came from a ship. This is the sort of place where you can expect to see a toast rack (complimentary).

Even if the Seaside Boarding House had gone a bit heavier on the succulents and rose gold, its setting would make it impossible to mistake for anywhere else in the world. The building, originally one of a pair of houses owned by members of the Pitt-Rivers family, commands a remarkable position above the sand, offering views from Portland Bill all the way over to Star Point. In the summer it’s packed, the terrace doing a roaring trade in rosé, but on a winter weekend it’s a glorious place to hunker down and admire the ever-changing waves. If you’re lucky you might spot a dolphin.

The hotel is the brainchild of Mary-Lou Sturridge, former managing director of the Groucho Club, which led one reviewer to ever so slightly sniffily dub it ‘Groucho-on-Sea’. We see no evidence of this: along with half a dozen weekending couples from around the country there’s a steady stream of locals and their dogs stopping off for coffee on the way home from a tramp along the South West Coast Path, which runs right past the hotel. Some return, sans sandy boots, for dinner in the lovely, Michelin-recommended dining room, whose tables are set with antique crockery and silverware and fresh flowers.

Seafood, unsurprisingly, is the kitchen’s focus, and the hand-picked crab, carrot and Melba toast is an easy yes, although we give very serious consideration to a twice-baked cheese souffle which our server confides they ‘can never take off the menu’. Wild sea bass with red cabbage and peppercorn sauce is superb, elegant without being fussy and accompanied by a moreish mountain of new potatoes tumbled in seaweed butter. For pudding we share a malt creme brulee and a chocolate mousse which is easily the best either of us has ever tried, beating even the legendary one from Chapon’s mousse au chocolat bar in Paris.

The next morning we wake to the sound of the waves and acres of blue filling the bay window. A quick call to the front desk and two coffees materialise discreetly on a silver tray outside our door (the team here are fantastic, friendly and consummately helpful). There are no televisions in the rooms, which I love, although you can switch on your Roberts Radio if you really can’t do without the news. I opt to ease into the day by lying in the claw-footed bath looking out at the sea. Downstairs, breakfast feels like the best sort of country-house hospitality, with a buffet table laden with freshly baked scones, banana bread, yoghurts, poached fruits and homemade granola. The hot options are pleasingly retro: think boiled eggs with anchovy-toast soldiers, and excellent kippers.

If you’ve brought a car, Bridport, with its antiquing opportunities, is just 10 minutes away. We came by rail and South West Trains regrettably abbreviated our visit, but if we’d had more time we’d have been setting out for a long, blustery walk on the beach, perhaps stopping off at lunchtime at the nearby Hive Beach Cafe for the catch of the day. We happily holed up in front of the fire instead, the team practically having to prise us out of the armchairs when it was time to leave. The Seaside Boarding House is something so many ‘AirSpace’ hotels claim to be, but are emphatically not: a home from home.

Rooms from £265 a night on a bed-and-breakfast basis. Visit The Seaside Boarding House’s website for more information and to book.

At a gallop

Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire

Every August bank holiday, a troop of eager volunteers descends on the Uffington White Horse, 10 miles east of Swindon, for a spot of weeding and whitening. Rechalking the 360ft-long artwork, carefully cut into the side of a chalk hill, has been happening every few years since it was made 3,000 years ago. During wars, plagues and drought, the White Horse has continued to gallop across the landscape, its slender body, beak-like mouth and streaming tail slowly changing shape over the centuries. Why was the Uffington White Horse made? No one knows. It is located close to an Iron Age hill fort, but may pre-date it. Did it define territory or was it an ancient fertility symbol? Or did it venerate the horses that were once thought to pull the sun across the sky?

A stitch in time

Bayeux Tapestry Victorian copy, Reading Museum, Berkshire

There are three things you should know about the Bayeux Tapestry. First, it is not a tapestry, but an embroidery, carefully stitched on linen panels in Kent in the years following the Battle of Hastings in 1066, in time for the consecration of Bishop Odo’s Bayeux Cathedral in 1077. Second, it is an incredible 230ft long and features 600 figures, 200 horses and 55 dogs. The third thing is that, although the original is in Bayeux, France (until September 2026, when it will be on display at the British Museum in London), there’s a full-size copy in Reading Museum created by the industrious Elizabeth Wardle and her team of volunteers in the 1880s. The tapestry has several scenes set in France before the final showdown between Harold and William the Conqueror in England, suggesting a French commission. However, several show Harold in a favourable light, implying that an English artist was in charge of the overall design.

Forever and beyond

Alice de la Pole’s cadaver tomb, Ewelme Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire

Alice de la Pole’s tomb fits snugly between the altar and a side chapel in the church in Ewelme, a small village in Oxfordshire. It was completed in about 1475 and at first glance seems like a regular alabaster tomb that you might find in any provincial church. Peer through the architectural dais on which her effigy rests, however, and you will perceive a second skeletal figure. Known as a cadaver tomb, this is the only one of its kind featuring a woman in Britain. De La Pole was Geoffrey Chaucer’s granddaughter and a significant and well-connected patron of the Arts. Whereas her pious effigy is carried up to Heaven by angels, the figure beneath is shown in a state of desiccation. Her hair runs free and her limbs are wizened. Gone is her wimple and coronet — now she appears half-dressed in a shroud, her feet bare and bony. Mortality is real, it seems to say, but your spirit can live forever in Heaven.

Into the wood

The Carved Room, Grinling Gibbons, Petworth House, West Sussex

The highlight of any tour of Petworth House is the Carved Room by Grinling Gibbons. Not only does it house a studio copy of Holbein’s Henry VIII, but it is decorated in gravity-defying swags and musical still lifes carved from limewood. Horace Walpole described it as ‘the most superb monument of his skill’. It was installed in the 1690s by the 6th Duke and Duchess of Somerset and was originally half the size. A century later, the space was expanded by the 3rd Earl of Egremont to create a grand dining room. He painted the panelling white behind the limewood carvings and commissioned four Turner landscapes of his parkland and investment projects (Brighton’s Chain Pier and the Chichester canal) to hang under the portraits.

Sailing the seven seas

The James Cook collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

You must work hard to find the 18th-century James Cook collection in the Pitt Rivers Museum. First, you need to locate the museum itself through an archway at the back of the central hall in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Then, you must navigate a maze of glass cases to access the first-floor balcony. There, in a single case, the cultural artefacts gathered by Capt James Cook on his three world voyages are clustered together. There are sculptures taken from the prows of canoes, imposing ceremonial robes, bundles of bark cloth and green nephrite pendants with circular shell eyes. Although there may have been little sense of the historical and contextual importance of such artefacts from Polynesia, New Zealand and Australia when they were first exhibited, they nevertheless inspired 20th-century Modernist sculptors in Britain, including Henry Moore and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Pretty as a picture

Dimbola Museum and Galleries, Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight

Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the first photographers to use the camera to make art. She experimented with composition and focal depth, staging literary and classical scenes with her friends and family as models. She also took nuanced portraits of the Freshwater Circle, the members of which frequented her house, Dimbola, in Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ellen Terry, G. F. Watts and William Holman Hunt. Cameron and her husband, Charles Hay, owned tea and coffee plantations in Dimbula, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and named their house after the estate. Most of Cameron’s photographs were taken at Dimbola; today, her home is open to the public and visitors can see Cameron’s studio, housed in a former chicken shed.

Brick by brick

The Watts Chapel, Mary Watts, Compton, Surrey

You may first decide to visit the Watts Artists’ Village near Guildford, Surrey, to see the purpose-built gallery of G. F. Watts, a hugely successful Victorian painter. Or you may choose to walk around the family home, Limnerslease, where pulleys in Watts’s studio allowed vast canvases to be winched up and down. However, the highlight of your tour may well be the Watts Chapel, built by his wife, Mary, between 1895 and 1904. She had trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and was 32 years his junior — his success could have been intimidating, but she found her own furrow as an artist. She built the circular mortuary chapel collaboratively, teaching 70 local volunteers how to make terracotta bricks using intricate moulds. The exterior features complex Celtic ribbonwork (a nod to her Scottish ancestry), but the interior explodes in a riot of line and colour. Red, purple and green angels throng the walls, as pronounced vines (made from gilded gesso) snake towards the sky.

Bohemian Haunt

Charleston, West Firle, East Sussex

The Bloomsbury Group’s Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant first rented Charleston, a farmhouse near Lewes, in 1916 to wait out the First World War, with Grant and his partner David Garnett working as farm hands to avoid enlisting. Friends and sometimes lovers, Bell and Grant also worked together, painting canvases as well as furniture, as part of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops. After 1918, they largely lived in London, returning to Charleston for summers of free and experimental loving, living and thinking, but moved there full time when the Second World War broke out. Their take on French Modernism is fused with an ongoing exploration of pattern and flatness, seen in the paintings that adorn the house’s doors, pelmets, tabletops, tiles, plates and lampshades, as well as walls.

Memories of war

Stanley Spencer murals, Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire

Stanley Spencer is most often associated with Cookham, the Berkshire village where he spent his childhood and much of his career. In 1927, however, he embarked on a series of paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel on the outskirts of Burghclere, a project that would occupy him for five years. This private chapel was commissioned by John and Mary Behrend and dedicated to Mary’s brother Harry, who had died of an illness contracted during the First World War. Both Harry and Spencer had served in Thessaloniki, Greece. The latter had worked as a medical orderly before enlisting in the infantry and he drew on his experiences of service for this task. His paintings fill the entire chapel, culminating in a vast depiction of dead soldiers rising from graves to hand white crosses to Christ on the East Wall. Others feature scenes of war from behind the front line — wounded soldiers arriving at hospitals, patients being cleaned, laundry washed and tea urns filled.

Home is where the art is

Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives, Cornwall

Barbara Hepworth had been part of the Hampstead Modernists during the 1930s, but, when war broke out, she moved with her husband, Ben Nicholson, to Carbis Bay in Cornwall. She bought Trewyn studio in nearby St Ives in 1949 and, following her separation from Nicholson, lived and worked there until her death in 1975. Her house, studio and garden were opened to the public as a museum in 1976. Today, you can follow her life as a sculptor in the displays in her former bedroom and kitchen, then enter her walled garden, where her plaster and stone studios remain untouched, her overalls still hanging on the door. She curated her garden to showcase her organic works, which carry within them the rhythms of the sea and the landscape she worked in. Her museum is now part of Tate and there are plans to turn her studio in the old dance hall next door into further exhibition space for St Ives’s most famous artist.

Follow the links for our other instalments of this series which look at London, the East of England, Scotland, the North of England, Wales, the Midlands and Ireland.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The road to Dolgellau — assuming you are coming from the east — sets the scene perfectly for a stay at Penmaenuchaf, a beautifully renovated Victorian country house hotel set in its own grounds on the edge of Snowdonia. Indeed it could not have provided a more appropriate backdrop to the musical biography of Beethoven playing on Audible. Soaring music, soaring mountains, dramatic valleys and sweeping turns. By the time we were half an hour from our destination we had pretty much planned our Saturday: we were going to walk, ideally up a mountain.

Once we had explored our room with its lovely view over the walled garden, its free-standing bath and comfortable looking bed we went to seek advice on our itinerary at reception. Snowdon was quite far away and too serious sounding (someone in the bar told us later that you have to get to the parking area by 7am to get a space). We plumped for Cadair Idris: not quite a mountain at 2,930 feet (about 890 metres), but much nearer and sounding tough enough. A six hours up and down so the helpful illustrated directions provided by the hotel suggested.

After a full Welsh in the restaurant we headed out the next morning for the short drive to the car park — filling up by 9.30am but by no means full — and set off with packed lunch (ordered from the hotel kitchen the night before) in a rucksack a kind member of staff had brought in for us. (We’d left ours at home.)

Although it wasn’t exactly raining there was a lid on the sky which only made the moment of reaching the summit — after two plus hours of walking, mostly uphill — all the more rewarding. But the real thrill, which was shared by all the other walkers, many of whom come here regularly, was when we emerged onto a grassy plateau into broad sunlight.

We had timed our arrival at the top with a cloud inversion — something it seemed that no one else here had ever seen either. Here we all were on the summit of Cadair Idris with the cloud spread out thickly below us as far as the eye could see and hiding all beneath it. Someone pointed to the far distance where, appearing as if by magic above the solid cloud line, was the blue-grey shape of Snowdon. Enjoying the sun and the respite after the climb up, groups of people were scattered across the grass, chatting, eating picnics and taking photographs. We may not have climbed Snowdon that day, but we all felt that it shared with us that unforgettable moment. After that, the rest of the day passed in a blur with tea and teacakes in Barmouth and a walk along the empty sand dunes before heading back for a hot bath.

Rooms at Penmaenuchaf startsfrom £230 a night on a bed and breakfast basis. Visit the Penmaenuchaf website for more information and to book.

Breaking the Ice (Age)

Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border

In a set of caves on the Nottinghamshire to Derbyshire border are some of the oldest British carvings in existence. The caves carry Victorian names, such as Mother Grundy’s Parlour and Robin Hood Cave, but the reindeer, birds and horned bovids incised on the walls date to the end of the last Ice Age. During the peak of the Devensian period, ice sheets a mile thick crunched their way across the northern half of Britain, but, about 16,000 years ago, this ice retreated and hunter-gatherers returned. They lived in caves and occasionally left behind markings on the walls that remain visible. The carvings date from 13,000–14,000 years ago and there are 90 in total, as well as several bone fragments engraved with horses and bison (now in the British Museum in London).

Heart of stone

The Church of St Mary and St David, Kilpeck, Herefordshire

St Mary’s Church in Kilpeck was built in about 1140 and has a semicircular apse and Norman nave. However, it is not its interior that makes it notable today. Holding up the roof and exterior wall beams are dozens of small stone trusses known as corbels, all carved with a wide range of people and animals. There are horses and pigs, a ram’s head and floating fish, moustachioed men and figures caught in the jaws of performing bears. And, tucked in a corner, is a Sheela-na-Gig. Found all over Europe, Sheela-na-Gigs are naked women whose spread legs reveal enlarged vaginas. They may be related to Celtic fertility goddesses or associated with the ancient pagan spring festival that celebrated rebirth (and became Easter).

A game of risk

Portrait of Abd al-Wahid bin Mas’ud, University of Birmingham, Birmingham

London was a teeming multicultural centre for global trade by the end of the 16th century. It was also at the heart of Elizabeth I’s growing empire. Ireland had been colonised and the Queen had set her sights across the Atlantic, but the troublesome Spanish kept jeopardising her plans with their attacks and interventions. In this portrait by an unknown artist, we are shown Abd al-Wahid bin Mas’ud, an ambassador from Barbary (northern Africa), who had travelled to London to ask for the Queen’s help in dealing with the Spanish. His king wished to attack Spain and called on Elizabeth for support, but she refused. Bin Mas’ud stayed in London long enough to have his portrait painted. Visitors such as him may have been the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s play Othello, first staged in 1604.

A trick up his sleeve

Antonio Verrio, The Heaven Room, Burghley House, Lincolnshire

Antonio Verrio was born in Puglia, Italy, and found initial success in Toulouse, France, but it was in England that he made his mark on history. Summoned by Charles II in 1676 to decorate his new apartments at Windsor Castle, he went on to complete 15 ceilings and four staircases before Charles died in 1685. The Italian remained loyal to the Stuart cause and initially refused to work for William III. Instead, he was employed by John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter, at Burghley House, Lincolnshire. Verrio’s Heaven Room is an incredible feat of Baroque trompe l’oeil, with classical gods and goddesses weaving between ornate Corinthian colonnades and a winged Mercury and leaping horse appearing to hover impossibly overhead. It’s hard to see where the painting ends and the room begins — door lintels supporting floral displays turn out to be two-dimensional and the heavily corniced ceiling is also pure paint.

Let there be (candle)light

Works by Joseph Wright of Derby, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derbyshire

A young Joseph Wright moved to London to study, showing his portraits at the Society of Artists, but he soon returned to Derby, where he spent much of his career. It was here that he painted the scientific ‘candlelight’ paintings that became his most famous works. The Derby Museum and Art Gallery now holds the largest number of his paintings in the world, including A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in Which a Lamp Is Put in the Place of the Sun (exhibited in 1766). In a darkened room, Wright lights up the orrery, a machine tracking the orbits of the planets around the sun — and illuminates the enraptured faces of all who gaze upon it. (The painting is currently on display at the National Gallery, London WC2, in ‘Wright of Derby: From the Shadows’, to May 10, 2026, when the show will transfer to Derby.)

Risen from the ashes

Coventry Cathedral, West Midlands

On November 14, 1940, German bombs devastated Coventry — all that was left of the cathedral was a smoking, roofless shell. By 1954, work had begun to rebuild it, following an architectural competition won by Basil Spence. He chose to situate the new building next to the ruins, rather than over them, and employed leading artists to enhance his resolutely modern design. Graham Sutherland’s 75ft tapestry behind the altar shows Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph; Elisabeth Frink designed the eagle lectern; John Piper’s Baptistery window illuminates the interior; and John Hutton’s etched glass screen allows angels to float over the ruins of the old cathedral. The new church took six years to build and was consecrated in May 1962.

Unappreciated in his time

The Wall, Anwar Shemza, Birmingham Museums Trust, Birmingham

Anwar Shemza was a successful artist in Pakistan before he decided to further his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1956. His former standing was not recognised in the British capital and he lost his confidence, taking solace in the galleries of the British Museum. It was here that he connected with Islamic art and, fusing this with his admiration for the watercolours of Paul Klee, created a distinctive new style that, in 1958, led to his early key painting The Wall. Despite his later success with his ‘Magic Carpet’ and ‘Chessmen’ series, he moved to Stafford in 1961 with his wife, the British artist Mary Taylor, and took a job as an art teacher. The rehabilitation of his reputation began in earnest four years after his death, when The Wall was chosen to feature on the cover of the catalogue for the important exhibition ‘The Other Story’, held at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1989.

You can see our previous instalments on the North of England, the East of England, London, Wales, Scotland and Ireland by following the links.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Side effect

Jesse sculpture, St Mary’s Priory Church, Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

Imagine how impressive this Tree of Life reredos, or altar screen, would have seemed when first made for St Mary’s Priory Church in Abergavenny in the 15th century. A twice life-size figure of Jesse — King David’s father and ancestor of Christ — reclined along the base. He has a long beard and is heavy set, strong enough to support a 30ft family tree that once grew from his side. As the carved oak branches reached higher, they revealed the lineage of Christ, from Jesse to the Virgin Mary. Sadly, in 1646, Parliamentary troops destroyed the screen during the Civil War and only the figure of Jesse remains. The whole altar screen would have originally been painted, but, today, we can see the grain of the oak trunk from which Jesse was carved. A new tree now rises above him in the form of a modern stained-glass window by Helen Whittaker, unveiled in 2016.

Follow your art

The Davies Sisters collection, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

Gwendoline and Margaret Davies were once the wealthiest women in Britain. Inheriting an industrial family fortune at the age of 25, the unmarried Welsh sisters travelled across Europe, studying art and making select purchases of works by Turner, Jean-François Millet, Auguste Rodin and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. From 1912, they focused on Impressionism and post-Impressionism (a decade before Samuel Courtauld did the same), acquiring such paintings as Renoir’s La Parisienne (1874), Cézanne’s Midday, L’Estaque (about 1879), van Gogh’s Rain: Auvers (1890) and Monet’s Waterlilies (1905). Their collection is now on display at the National Museum of Wales, but as early as 1913 they were lending it (anonymously), so it could be shared with a wider audience.

The sting of rejection

British Empire panels, Frank Brangwyn, Brangwyn Hall, Swansea

In Swansea’s Brangwyn Hall, 16 vast painted panels reflect the diversity of flora, fauna and people in the British Empire in the 1920s. They were originally destined for the House of Lords in London, but the beleaguered panels were rejected before eventually finding a permanent home in Wales. Brangwyn was a Welsh figurative artist who was well versed in communicating sweeping narratives in paint. He had initially been commissioned to create two war paintings commemorating the fallen relatives of those who sat in the Palace of Westminster, but his A Tank in Action (1926–28) was deemed too violent and realistic and, consequently, was turned down. The British Empire commission was supposed to be a salve, but this, too, was rejected, this time for being too colourful and vibrant.

Read our previous instalments on what to see in London, the East of England, Ireland, Scotland and the North of England.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Speaking in tongues

Aberlemno Pictish stones, Angus

Be warned: Pictish stones are strangely addictive. The more you see, the more you want to decode the mysteries of their unique visual language. There are 200 examples in Scotland, including the Dupplin Cross in St Serf’s Church in Dunning and those in the Meigle Sculptured Stones museum, both in Perth and Kinross. Three examples still standing in their original location along Aberlemno’s main road (above) provide us with an understanding of the evolution of Pictish carving. A double sinuous line, evoking a snake (or river) appears at the top of the Serpent Stone, above ornate dividers and a circular mirror. These are carved into the rock, but a later stone on the same road shows similar symbols — now highly decorated — standing proud. Below them, a hunting scene unfolds and, on the other side, a 10ft ring-head cross marks the arrival of Christianity in Pictland. (The stones are covered from October to March to protect them from excessive weathering.)

Checkmate

The Lewis Chessmen, split between the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh and the British Museum, London

Also featured in our London list, the Lewis chess pieces are tiny in stature — no more than 4in tall — but they command your attention. Carved from walrus ivory and sperm-whale tooth, they are richly detailed. Hefty kings and queens sit on their thrones, swords laid across passive laps. By comparison, the warders (rooks) are ready for battle — several bite their shields in anticipation, like ancient berserkers, who notoriously fought naked to intimidate their opponents. There are also clean-shaven bishops with tall croziers and knights in battle armour on stocky horses. By the time these pieces were made in 12th-century Trondheim, Norway, the expansion of Christianity had ensured that the bishop supplanted the earlier war elephant in the game. The chessmen were buried on Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, when the island was part of the Norwegian empire, and only found in the early 19th century.

For all that is holy

Becket’s reliquary casket, The Burrell Collection, Glasgow

Thomas Becket was a Norman who rose to become Henry II’s chancellor. The King relied on him heavily and rewarded him with the Archbishopric of Canterbury. However, Henry underestimated Becket’s religious zeal and was angered when he resigned as chancellor, confiding in his knights that he wished he could be rid of him. They took matters into their own hands and murdered Becket inside Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, on December 29, 1170. Within three years, Becket had been canonised by the Pope and a cult grew up around his remains. Every church and monastery in England seemed to own a piece of his hair shirt or drops of his spilled blood. These holy relics needed appropriate housing and the French enamel workshops in Limoges were quick to produce narrative caskets showing the knights slicing off Becket’s skull as he prayed.

We are family

Portrait of Elizabeth Murray and Dido Belle, David Martin, Scone Palace, Perth

This double portrait originally hung in Kenwood House, north London, the weekend retreat of William and Elizabeth Murray, Lord and Lady Mansfield. Scone Palace in Perthshire is today home to the Earls of Mansfield and the painting now hangs there, in The Ambassador’s Room. Murray was chief justice of England from 1756. He and Elizabeth had no children of their own, but agreed to raise their two great-nieces, Elizabeth and Dido Belle. The young Elizabeth’s father was ambassador to Austria and Paris; Dido’s father was Admiral Sir John Lindsay, commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy and her mother, Maria, was an enslaved woman from the Caribbean. In this painting by David Martin, dating from about 1776, Elizabeth sits quietly in a pink gown, a book in her lap, and Dido springs up from the bench, eager to be on the move. They both wear pearl chokers, but Dido is dressed in an exotic turban, as if to emphasise her mixed race.

Hark! The herald angels sing

Phoebe Anna Traquair’s murals, Mansfield Traquair Centre, Edinburgh

The Mansfield Traquair Centre was originally the Catholic Apostolic Church, built in Edinburgh in the 1870s by a congregation who believed in the imminent second coming of Christ. Phoebe Anna Traquair won the commission to fill the church with murals and she toiled on them from 1893 to 1901. A long one unfolds along both sides of the nave, telling the story of Christ and featuring scenes from the Old Testament. The West Wall features a choir of redeemed souls heralding Christ’s return, but it is the 62ft-high Chancel Arch that draws you in as you enter. Four giant cherubim, whose muscular wings shimmer in the rainbow light, float above symbols of the gospel saints. Traquair wove together Celtic symbolism with Pre-Raphaelite forms and religious iconography to create an interior that still dazzles.

Power couple

The Hill House, Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Helensburgh, Argyll & Bute

Hill House in Helensburgh is a total work of art. It was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1902–04 for the publisher Walter Blackie. Mackintosh’s austere architecture is complemented by an interior in which no detail has been left to chance, from his ladderback chairs and brass lighting sconces to the gesso paintings by his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. Together, they designed the mosaic fireplace surrounds, lampshades, bookshelves and bedsheets embroidered with stylised roses. Even the fire tongs have a sinuous twist. The couple met at the Glasgow School of Art and married in 1900. They were fêted in Vienna, Austria, where Gustav Klimt was a fan, and their Scottish take on Art Nouveau became known as the Glasgow Style.

Life in colour

Works by the Scottish Colourists, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and Kelvin-grove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

The artists known as the Scottish Colourists — F. C. B. Cadell, S. J. Peploe, J. D. Fergusson and Leslie Hunter — drew much of their inspiration from the vibrant hues of the South of France and the artistic movements they studied first hand in Paris before the First World War. In the French capital, they followed the lead of Matisse and the Fauves (Wild Beasts), increasingly turning to bright, unadulterated colour to create portraits, still lifes and landscapes. Yet, it’s in Scotland, where they were all born, that many of their works can be seen today, such as Fergusson’s Portrait of Anne Estelle Rice (1908) and Peploe’s 1913 Still Life (both National Gallery of Scotland), Hunter’s Roses in a White and Blue Vase (1908–10) and Cadell’s assured A Lady in Black from 1925 (both at Kelvingrove).

Follow the links for the other instalments in this series, which are based in London, the East of England, Ireland and the North of England.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Graveyard shift

The Regina Tombstone, Arbeia Roman Fort, South Shields, Tyne & Wear

The Regina Tombstone reveals the extent of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD. Her husband, Barates, was a soldier stationed at the mouth of the Tyne in northern England. He had travelled 3,000 miles from his home in Palmyra, Syria, without the need to stray beyond the empire’s borders. As a loyal servant of Rome, he communicated in Latin, the language of the inscription on his wife’s tombstone, but a separate inscription in Palmyran reads: ‘Regina, freed-woman of Barates, alas!’ Regina appears as a wealthy woman, her hand resting proprietorially on an armoured box used for storing jewellery and coins. Although we can no longer see her face, she sits in a wicker chair holding equipment for spinning thread, indicating a stable domestic life. Her tombstone was found at the Arbeia Roman Fort in South Shields, where it remains on display.

Follow the North star

The Scapegoat, William Holman Hunt, Lady Lever Art Gallery, the Wirral

In the late summer of 1848, seven young men formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Among them were William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, all students at the Royal Academy of Arts. They began signing their works ‘PRB’, secretly signalling their unity and their love of paintings and stories that pre-dated the High Renaissance of Raphael. Although the group exhibited their early masterpieces in London, many works ended up in the collections of wealthy northern industrialists. Consequently, the best place to see Pre-Raphaelite works today is in the North of England. Millais’s Isabella (1849) lives at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, with Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat (1854–56) across the Mersey at the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd (1851) is in the Manchester Art Gallery, as is Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852–65), with other key paintings in Sheffield, Carlisle, Newcastle and Leeds.

Art as a hobby

Paintings by L. S. Lowry, The Lowry, Salford, Manchester

L. S. Lowry was born in Greater Manchester and his ‘matchstick’ figures and industrial scenes are among the most recognisable pictures in Britain. He painted weddings, football matches and people on their way to work under heavy skies. Lowry’s mother didn’t believe art offered him good career prospects, so he enrolled as a clerk aged 15, only painting at weekends and evenings. He was taught by the French Impressionist Adolphe Valette, but his style was all his own, drawn from his experiences of going door to door as a rent collector in working-class areas of Manchester. His first exhibition was held in 1939, when he was in his fifties, and he only painted in his spare time until retirement. Nevertheless, his work now hangs in museums across the British Isles, with the largest public collection fittingly displayed at The Lowry in Manchester.

Becoming seen

Housewives with Steak-knives, Sutapa Biswas, Bradford Museums and Galleries, West Yorkshire

As a student at the University of Leeds, Sutapa Biswas asked her tutor Griselda Pollock if two black female artists — Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce — could come and speak to her year group. Biswas was the only British Indian student on the course and felt marginalised by the lack of visibility of black and Asian artists in the feminist art history that Prof Pollock was championing. Feminism had been a pronounced movement in Britain for 15 years, but many ethnic-minority artists initially felt excluded. Biswas later took part in ‘The Thin Black Line’, an exhibition curated by Himid in 1985 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She exhibited Housewives with Steak-knives (1985), imagining herself as the multi-armed Hindu Kali, goddess of destruction and rebirth.

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This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There’s an old paperback by my bedside in Herefordshire titled Life in Shakespeare’s England. It’s one of those pale blue Pelican books. Speaking of another age, it’s actually a manual on how to live life in the Welsh Marches, even now. After all, little has changed in these ancient borderlands between England and Wales in the four centuries since Shakespeare’s era.

When I walk across the local fields with my two spaniels, I constantly encounter vistas frozen in time. The farms and barns, the churches and belfries are exactly as they were when the Tudors were on the throne. You half expect someone to step out in a doublet, or a chamber pot to be discharged through an open window. In Herefordshire, your imagination can run riot. So it’s little wonder the makers of the much-anticipated adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s hit novel Hamnet came here to film.

Starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal — and released in UK cinemas on January 9 — Hamnet tells the story of Agnes, otherwise known as Anne Hathaway, as she deals with marriage and motherhood in 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon. When her and her husband William’s 11-year-old son Hamnet falls ill and dies, the family is utterly distraught. But as Shakespeare himself counselled in As You Like It, ‘sweet are the uses of adversity’, with this appalling tragedy inspiring some of his most enduring work.

Three years after his son’s death, the playwright began Hamlet, which prompted O’Farrell to try and link life and art, as Hamlet himself says to Horatio:

‘If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story.’

Originally, the events played out in Elizabethan London, where the plays were performed in theatres such as the Curtain, the Rose and the Globe, and the Bard’s birthplace in Stratford. It’s still the centre of the Shakespeare industry, with the house in which he was likely born and grew up located on Henley Street. The thatched farmhouse where Anne spent her childhood is likewise open to the public. And you can visit the Parish Church of the Holy Trinity, where Hamnet was buried on August 11, 1596. But to get to any of these places, you must do battle with Stratford’s one-way system and out-of-town retail parks, making you realise why director Chloé Zhao sought a more sparsely populated alternative.

The northwest corner of Herefordshire is such a place, blessed with several untouched villages, including Dilwyn, Eardisland, Eardisley, Kingsland, Lyonshall, Weobley, Wigmore and Yarpole. Along with my home of Pembridge, they are known as the ‘black and white villages’ thanks to the Victorians’ penchant for tarring the timbers of the houses and whitewashing the wattle and daub. Underneath, however, the original Tudor — and much earlier — structures remain.

I’d love to claim that Pembridge was home to Hamnet, with its (very old) New Inn, an incomparable place for a pint and a pie, as well as the extant butter market and the ancient bell tower. But the rumble of the Tarmac lorries along the A44, the village’s main thoroughfare, can sometimes mar the Shakespearean atmosphere. So the Hamnet team went a little further south, to Weobley.

Set back from the main roads, with a market square easily closed off to traffic, Weobley became Stratford during the summer of 2024. Bar the odd blue screen panel to cover up petrol pumps, streetlights and post boxes, the place was left more or less intact. And while a few bales of hay were placed on mud-sprayed streets to conceal the road markings, most locals didn’t notice, given the usual preponderance of farm traffic. Instead, the village itself did the work, with its crooked streets and cruck-framed houses sloping down to the parish church, as captured on a railway poster in the 1950s.

Having found a suitable ‘Stratford’, the filmmakers also had to locate a setting for more intimate scenes. Hamnet often harks back to Agnes’s childhood on Hewlands Farm, the homestead in Shottery now known as Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. For this, even Weobley proved a little too metropolitan, so they journeyed further west, to the border with Wales.

The chosen property even has a Welsh name, Cwmmau, with location fees used to fund vital conservation work at this Elizabethan farmhouse. It is owned by the National Trust and from March 2026 will once again be available as a holiday cottage, with a new kitchen and new bathrooms, as well as paint and papers donated by Little Greene. For a week or two, you too can live the Shakespearean life.

When you drive to Cwmmau, down snaking lanes, it certainly feels like you’re intruding on time, though the impressive outbuildings and the main house give a feeling of self-sufficiency. Only the views to Hay Bluff, Twmpa and the Brecon Beacons beyond indicate there might be a world outside. For all its glories, however, Cwmmau was chosen for its remoteness, mirroring the isolation of Agnes’s childhood after the death of her mother. Escaping the clutches of her cold stepmother and distant father whenever she could, she retreated into the nearby woods and immersed herself in Nature.

We cannot be sure whether either Agnes or her husband ever visited Herefordshire. The Lord Chamberlain’s (later King’s) Men, the company for whom Shakespeare wrote for most of his career, certainly travelled to nearby Shrewsbury, Gloucester and Worcester. While no record survives, it seems unlikely they would have missed out the cathedral city of Hereford. But even without a direct connection, Shakespeare definitely knew the area, as it’s mentioned several times in his plays.

At Pilleth, 10 miles north of Cwmmau, an appalling battle between the English and Welsh is described in Henry IV Part I:

‘…the noble Mortimer,

Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight

Against the irregular and wild Glendower,

Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,

A thousand of his people butchered.’

The same Mortimer family, once the most powerful in the Marches, was likewise associated with another local battle, at Mortimer’s Cross, mentioned in Henry VI Part 3. But rather than specific events, it is a quality of life and experience, still tangible in Herefordshire, that helps us understand the playwright’s worldview. You can really touch history here, as I learned when I first moved to the county and was inspired to write A Home for All Seasons. Blink, ignore the car you’re sitting in, and it could be the Middle Ages, given how little the settlements have changed. You can almost hear the stamp and bagpipes of peasants, with their white hose and scarlet tunics, accompanied by clattering empty pitchers. And it is such a beautiful county, the very picture of what England is in the collective mind’s eye, with villages of black-and-white houses nestled among rivers, farmland and hop gardens. As a local and suitably Falstaffian shop owner bragged: ‘Civilization begins west of the A49, just don’t tell anyone.’

Rudely, of course, I betrayed his request, as many others have done before and since, including the makers of Hamnet. But I’m glad whenever people come to Herefordshire and discover the rips in time that are revealed here. It’s where Shakespeare’s world becomes yours. All you need are some sturdy boots and a copy of the Complete Works.

‘A Home for All Seasons’ (Atlantic Books, £10.99) is available in all good bookshops.

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside.

Dangerous libations

How do you cope with a Kung-Fu Panda? What do you do when the Temple of Doom strikes? Olly Smith reveals how to deal with hurricane-force hangovers

Interiors

Is design destined to be more Moorish or will Egyptomania rule? Country Life predicts the shape of things to come in 2026 and Giles Kime says painted furniture is key to a laidback look

Jacu Strauss’s favourite painting

The creative director of the Lore Group chooses an intriguing unfinished 1830s painting that is still confounding art experts almost 200 years on

Learn it by art

The story of the British Isles is peppered with ancient artefacts and much-loved monuments. Charlotte Mullins surveys the centuries through 50 treasures, from the Ice Age caves of Derbyshire’s Creswell Crags to Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle at Greenwich in London

Are you ready to order?

Artfully designed menus have long been a tasty proposition for collectors, aided by designs from leading artistic lights such as Ravilious, Bawden and David Hockney, finds John F. Müller

Country-house treasures

John Goodall treads the silver-grey elm floorboards of the remarkably well-preserved 1630s hall dais at Restoration House in Rochester, Kent

Culture and commerce

John Martin Robinson marvels at the rejuvenation of Salts Mill, a vast Victorian factory building at Saltaire in West Yorkshire, founded on the prosperity of the British wool trade

The good stuff

Enter the new year fresh-faced and on tip-top form with the help of Amie Elizabeth White’s selection of skincare stars

Glistens like coral

The proliferation of new types of Japanese flowering quince prompted a four-year RHS trial. Charles Quest-Ritson cheers the rise of Chaenomeles and reveals his favourite varieties

Arts & antiques

The exquisitely rendered Cornish luggers sailing serenely across Henry Scott Tuke’s 1908 new year card to a friend make it a prized possession for Michael Grist, as he tells Carla Passino

Bucharest is an ugly city until it isn’t. The last 150 years have not been kind; from the Ottomans, to the Nazis, to the Soviet Union, the city and its people have suffered and, for a long time on the drive from the airport to its centre, that scarring is reflected in the buildings that line the streets. Grey, concrete, forlorn and forgotten.

But then it changes. The Soviet cement falls away, and a melange of medieval, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and neo-Classical elegance emerges from this chrysalis of oppression that has been surrounding Romania’s capital for generations. So much history has happened here and so much remains, and it is delightful. It is not obvious why they call it ‘Little Paris’, until it is.

All roads into Bucharest seem to lead to the Grand Hotel du Boulevard. Indeed, it is older than most of the roads, opening its doors in 1873 and drawing urban life to it. It was the first building in the city to have electricity, running water and a lift, and has long been the centre of culture here, receiving dignitaries such as Queen Victoria, Franz Josef and Constantin Brâncuși. Like many of the grand dames of Europe, she has seen and survived it all, ever present in a shifting political and socioeconomic landscape of this unshackled Eastern European democracy. For 10 years she lay silent, as she was redeveloped and restored by Corinthia Hotels and NIRO Investment Group, and reopened in March as a 30-suite triumph that is not only designed to be the very height of luxury, but a planted flag in the Romanian consciousness, one that says: ‘Anything you can do, we can do too.'

On the surface, the evidence is compelling. Here is a building that wouldn’t look out of place in Paris, Vienna or Monaco. The neo-Classical façade is iridescent, and the interiors rival anything you will see in New York, Milan or London, with shades of cream and gold, mixed with the hotel’s in house scent Elysee, dragging the senses to a world of Art Nouveau comfort that follows you wherever you go.

But the proof can be found in the staff, many of whom left Romania to work in high-end hospitality around the world, but have returned to elevate what they believe is the country’s first real effort in high-end luxury. It’s one thing being served dinner or drinks by someone being paid, and quite another by someone who walked out of a Four Seasons elsewhere to show you just how good life in Bucharest can be if you put your mind to it.

It’s a big swing from Corinthia and NIRO. Is Bucharest, so long in the minds of the English, just another eastern European city ripe for a stag weekend, ready to relaunch itself as one of Europe’s premier destinations? Let loose from the grip of barbarism, it is certainly trying its very hardest, and the Corinthia Grand Hotel du Boulevard is ready to shoulder the weight.

The rooms

In a word — vast. As mentioned, the hotel is nothing but suites, 30 of them, and while I didn’t see every one, the ones I did were all spacious as to be absurd. The bathrooms are a symphony of marble. Plush cream and the softest fabrics everywhere. A bed that could be used as a basketball court and springy enough to make slam dunks a cinch. Just the right amount of gold so as to be fancy without being ostentatious.

Floral hints and accents are almost everywhere, a nod to the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu, and make a nice contrast to the urban environment in which you are staying. Thankfully, the good people at Corinthia have found just the right balance between technology and tradition. I liked that the curtains open and close at the touch of a button. I loved that traditional light switches haven’t been removed for one of those infuriating multi-control screens.

Eating and drinking

The making of any decent hotel, especially one with aspirations as grand as this one, is having a good bar. Thankfully, the Grand Hotel has two. The Heritage Bar has a tremendous selection of signature cocktails and spirits, with an atmosphere as elegant as a European classic and none of the snootiness. The room is split beautifully into a central space interspersed with quiet little alcoves, perfect for whispered conversations, business dealings, and hushed affairs.

Sass’ Restaurant and Lounge is more for the party people, drawing inspiration from the eponymous Monaco brand and bedecked in chinoiserie panels, leopard print and lots and lots of red. If the Heritage bar is largo, this is all out allegro. When I visited, the movers and the shakers of Bucharest were pouring in and out, ready to start whatever parties they had planned for the later hours.

Fine dining can be found in Boulevard 73, which is helmed by Portuguese chef Pedro Mendes and is served in the domed ballroom that occupies the heart of the hotel. Formerly the courtyard, it is now the home of a superb menu of Portuguese, French and Romanian fusion. Don’t miss out on the caviar and Champagne.

Can I watch any polo matches while I’m there?

What a strange question, but the answer is yes. As mentioned, Romania is very much making an effort to move on from ‘stag do and cheap beer’ and elevate itself to a serious European player. The Singureni Manor Cup, Romania’s first polo tournament, is another example.

Hosted at the equestrian woodland retreat of Singureni Manor, the polo is the arena kind (although grass grounds are very much under construction), and the tournament takes place in September. For those who just like horses, or the wilderness, or luxury, Singureni Manor is open year round and is well worth the hour journey out of Bucharest to go and visit.

What else to do while you're here

For those who love history, the city is basically alive with former Soviet influence. It is home to the world’s heaviest building, the Palace of the Parliament, which was begun by former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and finished after his execution in the revolution of 1989. It is fantastically enormous, and the interiors are completely absurd. It is well worth a guided tour, although most of the (again, vast) building is unused.

Bucharest itself is like any up and coming European capital. The coffee scene is sensational, there are lots of good bars and restaurants, serving great beers and food (from the traditional Romanian to more modern European fare) and everyone is fantastically friendly. The Old Town is still a bit seedy, and should be avoided in the nighttime, but the Grand Hotel’s location on Calea Victoriei is in exactly the spot you want to be, and everything you want to visit is well within walking distance.

Who’s it for?

Couples who are a bit bored of the traditional ‘Paris, Venice, Florence, Barcelona’ city break. Be the most interesting person at a dinner party by saying you’ve been to Bucharest. I guarantee nobody else has been. And for the level of luxury you’re getting, you’ll be paying a lot less than those other cities too.

What gives it the 'wow' factor?

The service at the hotel is just exquisite and that’s because everyone who works there has a deep sense of pride about what the Grand Hotel is, and what it means.

What I would change

While the hotel wouldn’t look out of place in Paris, Milan or New York, I think it probably should. A splash more Romanian flair, especially in the rooms, would be great.

Prices at the Corinthia Grand Hotel du Boulevard in Bucharest begin at €450 per night.

Whisky is the most cosmopolitan of spirits, enjoyed, or at least consumed, wherever human beings gather to numb their senses. It’s also the most provincial of spirits. The taste, aroma and texture of a whisky — or at any rate a good whisky — are specific to the place where it was made. Pinpoint parochial. Which is why you can tell the difference between, for instance, an Ardbeg, a Laphroaig and a Lagavulin, even though the distilleries where they’re produced are just a few miles apart — in this case, on Islay, off the west coast of Scotland. This is known as ‘distillery character’.

Few distilleries are more characterful than Ardbeg. It’s among the smokiest of all whiskies; it’s also very sweet. If you haven’t tasted it, imagine washing down a handful of melted Skittles with a draught of seawater that had previously been used to put out a fire on a peat bog. Many connoisseurs consider it the definitive Islay malt.

In 1997, the brand was acquired by the Glenmorangie Company, part of the Moët Hennessy drinks conglomerate, which is itself part of the LVMH luxury-goods and hospitality group. Almost overnight, Ardbeg went from being a respectable old stalwart to a white-hot cult sensation, thanks not only to the quality of the whisky, but also the wit, originality and energy with which it was reintroduced to the market. New Ardbeg expressions were given catchy names such as Heavy Vapours, BizarreBQ and Wee Beastie. Another one, Galileo, was sent into outer space to see whether doing so would affect how it tasted. (It did.)

In short, those who love Ardbeg tend to love everything about Ardbeg: the flavour, the attitude, the aesthetic, the vibe. Which helps explain the new owners’ decision to open Ardbeg House, a ravishing little hotel in what used to be a Victorian pub with rooms in Port Ellen, 10 minutes or so from the Ardbeg distillery.

The interior design, by Russell Sage Studios, defies any attempt at easy categorisation. Objects made of reclaimed copper from decommissioned pot stills sit alongside bespoke furnishings in blown glass, driftwood, studded aluminium and kelp-coloured velvet. ‘Eclectic’ doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s as paradoxical and as strangely delicious as Ardbeg itself, at once sumptuous and silly, elegant and frothy, totally over the top and, occasionally, quite brilliantly subtle.

The 12 rooms have names not numbers and, though no two are alike, all celebrate some aspect of the legend and lore of Islay and of Ardbeg. I stayed in Monster, where maritime mythology looms large. I was struck by the finely sculpted tendrils that coil around the bedposts, which I fancied were evocative not only of sea serpents but also of those gloopy, slow-moving streaks that cling to the side of the glass when you pour a dram of neat whisky.

Talk to Russell Sage for five minutes (impossible — those five minutes will inevitably extend to 50) and you’ll realise that flourishes such as those streaky bedpost serpents are anything but accidental. The hotel is full of them. The degree of thoughtfulness throughout is impressive — in the fabulous Islay Bar and Signature Restaurant on the ground floor as much as in the rooms upstairs. Concept design in hotels is a hit-or-miss business. This one’s a hit.

Sage is perhaps best known to the high-rolling public for his work on the Fife Arms, in Braemar, and, among whisky lovers, for Glenmorangie House, near Tain, his first collaboration with Moët Hennessy. They are places of powerful enchantment. But there’s something about the wild coherence of Ardbeg House that suggests a particularly close alignment between designer, project, place and product. Which is interesting, because Russell himself doesn’t have a taste for whisky. ‘Don’t drink,’ he told me. ‘But I can live off fumes.’

In a roundabout way, that’s what makes Ardbeg House great. You don’t have to be a whisky freak to get it. Let the Ardbeg pilgrims prop up the hypnotically lit bar and make their way through the 150-odd whiskies on offer (including several Ardbegs that are available nowhere else on earth). They’ll be happy. They were probably happy before they arrived. The rest of us can live off the fumes and savour the kooky buzz that the place as a whole inspires.

Rooms start from £225 in the winter and from £420 in the summer on a bed and breakfast basis.

Can 18 million people be wrong?

That's the number of folk each year who visit the Lake District, but — and it pains me to say this, as someone who loves Cumbria and has been many times — I do worry that most of them leave disappointed. A worryingly high percentage of tourists jump on one-day tours from as far afield as London, spending hours on coaches or trains in order to grab a few pictures down by the edge of Lake Windermere, buy a few souvenirs and a cream tea, and then head back down the M6.

It's like — I don't know — flying to Rome, heading directly for the Sistine Chapel, and spending 15 minutes marvelling at one of the Great Works of Mankind before quickly sending a postcard with a novelty Vatican stamp, and then heading back to the airport. Tick-box tourism at its worst.

The unfortunate thing is that the day trippers have given Lake Windermere a reputation as an underwhelming place to visit, with the disappointed hordes leaving lukewarm TripAdvisor reviews after completing their 'Eight Lakes in Half a Day' guided tour. (I wish I was making the 'eight lakes' tour up, but it really does exist. Forget wandering lonely as a cloud, in 2025 a visit to the Lake District only counts if you speed past Grasmere and Ullswater at 60mph en route to the next souvenir shop.)

The point I'm clumsily making here is that Lake Windermere is still a good place to visit. You just have to do it right, and Storrs Hall is about as a good a way to see it as anywhere I've ever come across. Built in the dying years of the 18th century, it owes its existence to Sir John Legard, a wealthy Yorkshire land owner based in Ganton who crossed the Pennines in search of a place to re-create the sort of Swiss waterside villa he and his wife had once lived in on Lake Geneva.

The spot he picked is breathtaking, arguably the best on the lake, jutting out on its own little headland, secluded and unspoilt despite being just a few minutes from Bowness, which is one of the busiest tourist spots in Britain.

The Georgian Society (the PDF link is here) published a fascinating history of Legard and Storrs Hall, but the upshot is that he hired an unknown architect to build the wonderfully grand home you see on these pages. Legard and his wife sadly had no children, and after his death the place ended up in the hands of a wine merchant called David Pike Watts, who ended up welcoming a quite stupendous roster of great artists and writers: Wordsworth and Coleridge both came to stay, as did John Constable, who was a nephew of Watts.

Today you don't have to be a world-famous artist or poet with a global reputation to visit: Storrs Hall has been a hotel since 1890, and since 1997 has been owned by the Hindle family, who have updated the place without taking anything away from its old charm. The bar and bedrooms might have a distinctly modern sheen, but many of the hotel's communal areas have been treated with a very light touch. There are rough edges which you'll choose to see either as faults, or part of the Georgian charm.

Either way, as you enjoy breakfast looking out over the lawns, or take a turn through the woods and round the water's edge to the Temple of Heroes, you'll be enjoying an experience that Legard and his wife would recognise instantly if they were somehow resurrected to drop in. Let's just hope they don't do so on a day trip from London.

The rooms

Storrs Hall feels like a very big house, but it's a modestly-sized hotel: there are 36 rooms, spanning everything from traditional rooms in the main house to the 'Lakeside Hot Tub Suites', which might score lower (okay, zero) for traditional charm, but have great views. And hot tubs, of course.

Pick of these newer options is The Boathouse, which has its own private terrace, private parking and even a private jetty should you wish to come and go by boat. This is a completely self-contained escape, where you can have breakfast in bed delivered from the main hotel, then spend the rest of the day lounging beside the water, enjoying the views.

Eating and drinking

The Lake Edge Restaurant, open only on Friday and Saturday evenings, is a traditional place to eat in the charming old dining room, with high ceilings, huge windows and great views. (You'll also get breakfast here.) The restaurant serves an £85 fixed price menu of classic dishes sourced from the the local area: the majority of the produce used comes from within 15 miles, while the seafood comes in from Morecambe Bay.

There's also the Bistro, decorated in more modern, eye-catching hues, more child-friendly, and an easy-going place for everything from bowls of soup or cheese toasties to Cumbrian lamb or a Chateaubriand steak. Beyond mealtimes, Storrs Hall also does afternoon tea, which you can have out in the garden if the weather plays ball.

How they'll keep you busy

The hotel is a base in which to relax, unwind and recharge; the natural playground that is the Lake District is at your feet. That might mean board games in the drawing room, or it might mean heading for the hills. You can walk right out of the front door and up into the surrounding mountains, take a boat tour on the lake, or even indulge in some wild swimming (make sure you check with the staff for safe areas away from boat traffic).

Frankly, you could also quite happily just potter in the grounds, as was the creator's original intention — and don't miss wandering through the grounds to the Temple of Heroes, built right out into the water, where the likes of Nelson are remembered.

What else to do while you're there

Have you heard that you can visit eight lakes in an afternoon? Okay, only joking... the joy of the Lake District is taking your time, indulging your passions. The villages of Ambleside and Bowness heave with tourists (that's not to say that they don't have their charms), but it's incredibly easy to find some space and time of your own, even around Windermere, but in particular at the smaller lakes away from the main roads through the area.

For energetic, outdoorsy types, mountain biking, 4x4 driving, canoeing and canyoning are all things the Storrs Hall team can point you towards. And for true daredevils, something called the 'Via Ferrata Xtreme' will guide you on an utterly terrifying-looking adventure in the Holister Pass. It involves rickety rope bridges, scaling mountains and traversing cliff faces. You have been warned...

Who is it for?

Anyone, and everyone, who thinks the Lake District is worth more than a day trip.

What give it the 'wow' factor

Location, location, location. Legard's aim was to find the most beautiful spot on Windermere. It's hard to argue that he didn't succeed.

The one thing we'd change

I'd love to have had a few more options for pottering and enjoying the hotel — board games in the lounge are great, but it's the kind of place where a really good games room or a putting green would make it even better.

Insider tip

The standard room rates are reasonable, but the hotel often runs offers — particularly in low season — for extra nights, inclusive dinners and so on. And if you've a bigger occasion in mind, Storrs Hall offers 'proposal' packages to help you pop the question in style.

Storrs Hall, Bowness-on-Windermere — standard room rates from £196. See the Storrs Hall website for more details and booking.

The spirited wildness of the North Yorkshire coast exerts a powerful romantic pull. Towering dunes and vertiginous cliffs come down from the land to clean, sandy beaches where the land meets the chilly, churning North Sea. The towns along this stretch — among them Whitby, Saltburn and Robin Hood’s Bay — blend the charm of fading Victoriana with the kitsch appeal of a British seaside holiday. You feel, looking across the waves to Denmark and Norway, as if you’re on the edge of the world. To stand on this coast is to sense, for a moment, what it must have been like for Dark Age Britons when Vikings made ground here a millennium and a half ago. It’s not hard to see why Bram Stoker set Dracula at Whitby.

All of which makes Saltmoore a rather curious hotel indeed, for this is a seaside hotel where you could quite happily spend a few days without ever recalling that it’s in the same postcode as the fine beach at Sandsend, a couple of miles north of Whitby. Located a few hundred yards off the main coast road, Saltmoore is tucked away amid 85 acres of hills and woodland, a hidden retreat from the world where only the occasional waft of sea spray on the breeze reminds you of where in the world you are. This is a world of plush rooms, a sensational spa and garden, and excellent dining. It’s like a miniature Yorkshire version of Shangri-La, where the reality of the world seems to disappear from your mind.

The rooms

There’s been a country house hotel on this spot for many years — it used to be called Raithwaite Hall — but the place was completely re-done before opening in Autumn 2024 as Saltmoore, with 43 charmingly decorated rooms in the original period house, and a further 29 in a newly-built annexe dubbed ‘The Beach House’.

We stayed in the latter — despite its name, there are views only of the car park in one direction, and woodland in the other — in a generously-proportioned room called the Beach House Suite. It was perfectly big enough for a family of four, with a vast bed plus a sofa-bed and a Z-bed for the kids, plus a free-standing bath in the bay window and a en-suite bathroom. The pictures here speak for themselves: it’s a beautiful space, even if the relaxing blue paint of the wood-pannelled walls is as close as you’ll get to seeing the sea.

Up in the main hotel, the rooms are even more eyecatching: the Nest Suite, with its impossibly shiny bathtub, is nominally the best room in the house, but the Orchard Suite’s terrace with outdoor bathtub is also the sort of room where you’d happily disappear for days without feeling the need to surface.

Eating and drinking

Saltmoore currently has a brasserie in the main house and a (superb) pizzeria in the Beach House, with food under the eye of executive chef Adam Maddock, who’s been poached from the Fife Arms, and oversees everything from the Yorkshire breakfast and the chic bar to the picnic baskets that you can take down to the beach.

A fine dining restaurant will be opening in the coming months, but there’s no need to put off a visit on account of the food: The Brasserie earned a special mention in the Michelin Guide a couple of months ago, with the ‘wonderfully pure Whitby crab’ earning special praise.

How they’ll keep you busy

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably noticed that this isn’t a place where you’ll feel like you need to do any more than just relax — and to help you do so, the Sanctuary Spa is delightful, with a decently-sized indoor pool with sauna, Jacuzzi, steam room and views out of glass walls of the gardens and woodland around. It’s worth bearing in mind, both for those who have children and those who don’t, that barring a couple of hours a day this is a child-free space.

Should you be feeling more energetic, we’ll remind you (and you may need reminding) that the sea really is just a ten-minute walk down the long hotel driveway. Surfing lessons, horse riding, cycling and even a coastal running club can all be arranged by the Saltmoore team.

What else to do while you’re there

Whitby, a couple of miles to the south of the hotel, has one of the most dramatic and beautiful abbeys in the world, a towering Gothic run atop a hill with views of the town, the harbour and out to sea. Saltburn-by-Sea, a quarter of an hour or so drive to the north, is also worth a visit, if only to ride the glorious Victorian funicular railway that plies the route between the beach and the town.

And of course, from Whitby you have the entire North Yorks Moors National Park to enjoy, whether you do so on foot, by car, or riding the gorgeous steam railway. And while it’s a longer drive, the magnificent Castle Howard is absolutely one of the finest houses in the country, and an absolute must.

Who is it for

Couples — of all ages — looking for a luxurious escape where you can do as much, or as little as you like. While children are catered for, will enjoy the sandy beaches, and were doted on by staff, we’d say that adults will enjoy Saltmoore’s vibe more.

What gives it the ‘wow’ factor

Easy: the Sanctuary Spa’s pool.

The one thing we’d change

Have we mentioned the lack of sea views yet? Okay, so it’s not something that can be changed, but it’s a compromise you’ll need to be happy with.

Insider tip

One of the stations on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, Goathland, might look familiar: it’s world famous for playing the role of Hogsmead Station in the Harry Potter films.

Rooms start from £320 a night, or £650 for two people staying two nights with £50 each towards dinner. Visit the Saltmoore website for more information and to book.

Standing in the Scottish midday sun in his kilt, Hamish Martin holds up a small white flower. ‘It’s incredible,’ he says in wonder. ‘It’s the flower called “eyebright” and if you really look at it, the detail is incredible.’ Hamish is often out in the hills with people who spend much of their time travelling across the world, and who see all sorts of great manmade wonders, ‘but the real universe,’ he goes on, ‘is in there’. He often asks guests to take a picture of the flower and then zoom in — each and every time, they are amazed by the colours and the immense complexity of a flower by which most of us would simply walk unheeding. When I look down at the myriad colours, the violet and yellow, Hamish explains that, for centuries, people in the Highlands used eyebright as ‘an eyewash’, for Highlanders who, as he does, get hay fever.

As he speaks about botany-cum-folklore in the sort of detail that it takes a lifetime to learn, Eliza Brown, who founded Rvival four years ago, saddles up the two Fell pack ponies that would carry our kit for the day. I didn’t realise it at the time, but that moment with Hamish, in a quiet way, was quintessentially ‘Rvival’. It is about recognising value in things most of us have long forgotten about. It was about learning to appreciate the dizzying brilliance of the natural world again.

When Eliza started Rvival, she was at a low ebb. For some time, she had taken on challenges that were all about climbing higher, doing things faster and going further. They were, in her words, ‘extreme expeditions’ and, ultimately, she sustained an injury from carrying too much kit and had to rethink. When she was recovering, she set off across Scotland, heading from the south towards Cape Wrath at the northern tip with a pack pony, which forced her to travel at a different pace. Rather than rushing on to ‘tick off another box’, that next Munro or a new ocean, Eliza found herself taking time. She could go no quicker than the pony was willing to. Moving steadily through Nature, she found herself reflecting on her relationship with the world. As she journeyed, a memory of her grandfather making sticks when she was a child came into her head. It was the smell she recalled most vividly, ‘hazel and resin’. That memory inspired her to think about other skills we’re starting to lose, such as foraging and making fire. In losing them, she realised, we are losing part of ourselves and what it means to be human.

Eliza had been working on yachts and, back home after Cape Wrath, an idea started to come together. What if she took the sort of people who went yachting into the wild, ‘to offer them the opportunity to slow down and give them the skills to be in these places again’? It was only an idea, but she hoped that, if she got it right, she might impart greater respect for the land, something that her own packhorse journey had inspired in her.

When Eliza has saddled the ponies — which hail from Tom Lloyd’s Hades Hill herd—and Hamish has told me about the benefits of making tea out of the red clover beneath our feet, we head up into the hills. There is something timeless about wandering with Fell ponies. It’s a mode of travel that would have been entirely familiar to our ancestors 200 or 300 years ago, traipsing the packhorse trails that are now little more than memories in a landscape, but the idea of using Fells today is sadly little more than a curiosity for most. ‘They are special,’ Eliza says, wandering ahead of me, ‘it’s about maintaining a dying breed.’ For a bit, we walk in silence, except for the soft breathing of the ponies and a distant raven croaking in the late-summer heat.

By midday, we’ve passed Rob Roy’s Putting Stone, a boulder well known to climbers and lovers of Scottish history, and reached Lochan an Eireannaich, our lunch stop. It is a loch Hamish knows well, often showing guests how to fish it and, as he swims, Eliza explains that Rvival can be whatever clients want it to be. In a very short period, she’s assembled an extraordinary team of 19 people to create bespoke adventures. There’s Nigel Hawkins, who can take guests hawking, there’s the Basan family for a wild culinary experience — such as smoking freshly caught fish on the beach — and Gilly McArthur for ice swimming. Eliza’s team is varied, but all care about tranquillity, discovery and finding a deep connection with the wild.

Eliza soon began to get remarkable requests. She’s had famous actors, heavyweight CEOs, the footballer Ian Wright and our guest editor himself, Sir David Beckham, all joining her trips. The latter ended up in a bothy on the uninhabited island of Scarba with Rvival and Eliza fondly remembers finding him sharing a freshly landed scallop with her spaniel by the front door.

What Eliza realised is that her offering, the chance to ground yourself, is of great interest to those whose lives are lived at pace. It wasn’t her plan to attract people such as David, but people with demanding schedules, given a quiet moment, often find themselves thinking about tranquillity and ‘earthing’.

That evening, the ponies fed and watered, Tom Lewis, chef-proprietor of the Monachyle Mhor hotel in Highland Perthshire, skins a roe buck and lights a fire. Seeing somebody who really knows how to use a knife (in this instance, a knife made by the knife-maker Mic Taylor, a craftsman who is part of the team at Rvival) is really something.

Eliza is keen to redefine luxury and part of that is offering very simple food, but food that is absolutely first class. Tom's pan-fried roe buck with foraged chanterelle mushrooms is exquisite. It’s charming to see such a seasoned pro getting behind the Rvival vision. It’s like the passing of a passion from one generation to the next.

The following morning, feeling exactly as I deserve to feel, given I’d stayed up late drinking whisky, I swim with Gilly. For all that I spend time outside, I hardly ever go for a dip and to reckon with the water as she does, as a source of revitalisation and wonder, is challenging and refreshing. Much of Rvival is about trying new things and, although I know my way around a deer carcass, I didn’t know that cold water can boost testosterone. I am now eagerly awaiting Gilly’s forthcoming book on cold-water swimming.

Our trip is an adventure of two halves. After Monachyle, we drive north to the Torridon estate, to find Zeki Basan gutting mackerel by a fire. As I stand with him, talking about rifles and deer and dogs, I realise this is the sort of thing we should all take time to do. In a world where people are disconnected from Nature, Zeki's passion is remarkable — David was reportedly amazed by it and it’s easy to see why, as there is something druidic about this man. His knowledge of plants and fungi connects him with a lost time.

Over the following few days, we snorkel for scallops, smoke mackerel on the beach over seaweed and, in the evenings, sit to listen to Sarah Von Racknitz, a native of Skye, playing the fiddle. It is both rustic and eccentric. Watching her, at one with the instrument, is to feel yourself becoming part of Highland culture.

On my final day, I have an experience that will stay with me forever. Among the birches and oaks, I sit with Zeki in a drizzle and he shows me how to make fire. It is a history of man. Some 50,000 years ago, ancient people would strike flint against pyrite, above tinder, until, finally, a spark took. As he demonstrates the art, against a tanned deer hide, it feels as if we have fallen back through time and are two Mesolithic men after a day of hunting. After using the pyrite, Zeki shows me how to use a bow drill, an intricate process that requires the right sort of wood (as a child, he failed many times). The specific thing I’ll remember is him showing me how amadou, a spongy layer of horse’s hoof mushroom, catches a spark and stays slowly smouldering without catching aflame. It allowed people to take fire with them on long expeditions. ‘Sometimes,’ he notes, as the rain falls harder, ‘families would carry fire from one generation to the next.’ It’s an extraordinary thought and, in a way, what Eliza and her team are doing at Rvival is carrying the fire.

Zeki’s demonstration offers the same thing that Hamish's thoughts on eyebright did and they chime, too, with Gilly's love of water — it is about slowing down and seeing the value in something that was once valued when we were more human.

Excursions with Rvival cost from £2,500 per person. Call 07377 386811 or visit their website for more information.

It was a nine hour drive to Scotland, supposedly, and by the time we locked our front door in London, my husband and I were fed up about going anywhere. For one thing, the roof box on top of the car was creaking pathetically, and I had to crane out of a window to keep an eye on it, and for another, we had been awake until 3am that morning, locating stuff like netted midge hats, and a tick removal card illustrated with the types of hostile insects that you might find in the Highlands in July.

Fortunately, somewhere around Heathrow on the M4, all three of our young children fell asleep, and things began to look up. We pulled over in Oxford, at Hamblin Bread, to buy the world’s best cheese scones, chock full of red Leicester and spring onions, and motored north through the edgelands of Birmingham and then Manchester, stopping and starting as knots of traffic allowed. By the time we made it up the M6 into Cumbria, where you have the cattle-specked Lake District on one side, and the foggy lower reaches of the North Pennines on the other, the fells of both blotted out by mists, we’d rallied and were full of beans. Everything was charming. I made the journey longer by stopping to photograph and look up the names of boreal roadside weeds. These were discovered to be not dissimilar from weeds in the south.

The sun went down around Crieff, which was decked with signs about the town’s upcoming Highland games, and the lochs became dark and unsettling as they slid past the car, startlingly close to the road. About 14 hours after leaving the house, we arrived at The Fortingall, a 10-room Victorian hotel that fronts a country road in Aberfeldy, Perthshire. As the car doors opened, live music was spilling out of the Fortingall’s attached pub, The Ewe, into the black-skied glen.

This most recent iteration of The Fortingall (above) opened in June, but it was purpose built as a hotel in 1891, and there have been lodgings for travellers on this exact stretch of land for even longer. The reason is obvious: on the cusp of Glen Lyon (pronounced ‘lion’), surrounded by a harsh green ridge of mountains with the River Lyon running through it, this is one of the most idyllic valleys in Britain, and travellers of many eras have been susceptible to it. The smart attic rooms where we spread out for a few days, appointed with a feather-topped bed and a separate sitting room with a pull-out sofa, have a crow’s nest view of pine-covered hills and flocks of Scottish Blackface sheep.

Breakfast (and dinner, if you’d like) is served in a bright dining room with textured pink walls and a log fire, and is both traditional (silver toast racks; a postcard fry-up with a tattie scone and slow-cooked, jammy tomatoes) and nicely up-to-date (staff have undergone barista training and deliver espresso-based coffees using beans from nearby Glen Lyon Coffee Roasters). Borrowing rods and a filled picnic hamper from the hotel, we went fishing in Peter’s Pool, a revered swoop of the River Lyon that draws wild salmon with a local guide who taught our eldest son, aged six, how to cast. On another day, we walked to the Allt da Ghob waterfall, which has a 200-metre drop and a sweet, narrow stone bridge at its base, known in the area as The Roman Bridge, although it’s thought to date from the 17^th century.

The driving route from Aberfeldy to Eilean Shona, a 4km-long tidal island in the Inner Hebrides takes around three hours, through the thick of the Scottish Highlands and some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes I’ve seen in my life. The sights are particularly magnificent on the A82, which runs directly through Glencoe, past the colossal Stob Ghabhar and Bidean Nam Bian mountains, among many other peaks, their craggy faces streaked with rivulets and waterfalls. We detoured to Fort William to pick up a week’s worth of groceries, before skirting the edges of boat-filled Loch Eil and comely Loch Eilt, dotted with minute islands, to the jetty across from Eilean Shona. From there, having unloaded suitcases, umbrellas and carrier bags splitting with dried pasta and oversized marshmallows into a motor boat, we chugged 10 minutes across Loch Moidart and disembarked on the island.

Eilean Shona is privately owned by the hotelier and entrepreneur Vanessa Branson, who bought the island along with her ex-husband, Robert Devereux, in 1995. The island has changed hands only a few times since the 19^th century, when it hosted guests such as the American artist John Singer Sargent, who painted two watercolours of Loch Moidart, and later, the writer and playwright J. M. Barrie, who stayed at Eilean Shona House — the largely Victorian, principal building of the island — for a month during a soggy summer in 1920, while working on the screenplay for Peter Pan. In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, his personal secretary, on August 13, 1920, Barrie wrote about the house and island: ‘This is a very lovely spot, almost painfully so… It almost taketh the breath away to find so perfectly appointed a retreat on these wild shores. The Ritz could not do us better.’

Along with weatherworn Eilean Shona House, which leans handsomely out of the pine trees on a rise as you approach the island, Vanessa found herself with a clutch of former crofting cottages and other structures, which are run as self-catering hideaways. Some of these are aimed at off-grid travellers: gas-powered lamps and fridges, hot water from wood burners, no WiFi, and scanty mobile signal. At the other end of the no-frills spectrum is where we were staying, in the two-bedroom Sail Loft (above), a newly rebuilt boat house (with sundry nautical equipment still stored on the ground floor) in the harbour. The planked, A-frame interiors are serene, painted all white with a copper tub and a woodburning stove in the centre of the cabin. There was a rosy sundown on our first night, and we set the table on the cantilevered front deck to eat spaghetti with our coats on. The tide was in, and the view full-boil romantic: a glassy expanse of the loch, with the medieval ruin of Castle Tioram jutting from a crag on its own, smaller island, directly ahead. We watched, forks swivelling, as other guests walked towards the water in bathrobes, discarding them on the dock before cold-plunging into the loch. A wood-fired sauna stands nearby on the shore, and after swimming, people would dart inside to get warm again.

Activities on Eilean Shona are of the derring-do variety, and the weather is unreliable year round, so it’s useful to be a good sport. Hiking to the highest peak on the island, Beinn a' Bhàillidh will take an easy hour, and the payoff is well worth getting soaked to your shins in peat bogs on the ascent. From the windy cairn at the absolute top, you can see the skidding islands of Muck, Rhum, Eigg, and Skye to the west, and reportedly, on clear days, the pinnacle of Ben Nevis to the east. For a shorter, more child-friendly walk, you can follow the coastal path for 15 minutes or so from the harbour, to a rocky headland known as Contemplation Point. We built a campfire there, in a cleft in the mossy stone, and toasted marshmallows speared with sticks.

There are canoes and kayaks for daily rental (free if you’re staying in the Sail Loft), and you can help yourself to both, along with paddles and life jackets. For our first outing on the water, we paddled for 15 minutes or so across the loch to Castle Tioram, pushing the boat up the short beach so it wouldn’t be washed out by the tide. The ruin itself is unsafe to approach, full of unsteady stonework and sudden drops (its restoration is embroiled in a planning permission fracas), but we explored the rest of the island, grassy paths swagged with heather and ragwort, and ate a picnic beneath the roof-less 13^th century tower. The pitched outline of the Sail Loft was clearly visible across the water from where we sat.

A live-and-let-live atmosphere prevails on the island. That mentality is, in part, down to resources: there aren’t enough staff on Eilean Shona to assess the boating abilities of the guests, or remind them to pay attention to the tide table. But it also feels, in this scarcely inhabited part of the world, like self-determination is baked into the greensward. One morning, a motor boat dropped our family off at Shoe Bay, a remote white sand beach and one of those spectacular, incongruously Caribbean-like settings that crop up in this part of Scotland. We passed dozens of dappled harbour seals on the way over, sleeping and galumphing, scattered across islets that were sometimes only feet wide. At the beach, we found the sand freshly covered in crab shells — the remains of an otter’s breakfast. The motor boat departed with an intention to return sometime after lunch, and we spent a memorable morning in the bay, alternately having cold swims and wrapping ourselves in jumpers and towels, before the boat reappeared.

It lingered near a sandbank while we climbed aboard. Then, as the captain revved the engine, the boat ground into the sand and wouldn’t budge. A pair of passing kayakers, and a family in a four-seater canoe, were hailed to help push, but it was no use. A quick brouhaha played out. The boat was stuck until nightfall, when the tide came back in. And we would have been stuck with it, but for the presence and generosity of the family with the canoe, two of whom remained with us while our captain paddled with the others back to the harbour, over an hour away, to find a RIB to retrieve everybody. Those of us who stayed behind collected limpet shells and built sand castles. The kids took turns staying out of the sun, in the cabin of the beached boat. Hours later we were bathed and dry, with a story to tell.

On the day of departure, we were ready at 9am sharp to catch the tide, and arrowed over the water to the mainland and our parked car. We made our way east on the loch-lined A830, past hundreds of trainspotters waiting around the Glenfinnan Viaduct. Four hours later we rumbled into Edinburgh, where we broke up the drive back to London at the just opened, 214-room Hoxton hotel in Haymarket, a well-connected neighbourhood slightly removed from the action of the New Town and Old Town districts. The hotel is 11 terraced townhouses strung together, with a wide, colourful lobby, fragmented into clusters of tiled fireplaces and plentiful seating, and a sweeping brass bar. Guests belly up to little café tables with their laptops, creating an atmosphere of camaraderie and bustle.

After a week of campfires and swimming, midge repellent and simple eating — though decadent — the hotel felt cartoonishly civilised. We soaked it up. There were salads and burgers in the lobby restaurant, followed by a cheese course from I. J. Mellis for pudding; powerful showers; interconnecting rooms with built-in, ship cabin bunk beds for the two eldest boys. The next morning the five of us emerged, rested and full of a hot breakfast, ready for the long drive home.

Ask six different AI systems for the most beautiful city in Britain and the answer is most likely Edinburgh. Chatronix.ai, a tool that purports to ‘put all your AIs in one place’, compiled a list last week based on the different answers given to the question by ChatGPT, Gemini, and four others. Edinburgh came out on top, followed by Bath, York, Cambridge and Oxford. This sounds broadly correct — although, personally, I’d bump Oxford up to bronze. (Ed: the writer went to the University of Oxford so it's surprising that he didn't bump it up to silver while he was at it.)

The methodology, however, raises two important questions. By treating AI’s answers as reliable, we recognise the value of consensus over expert opinion. ChatGPT and Gemini scan not only newspaper articles, but online forums in a bid to give a more accurate answer.

Are they right to?

The second question contends not with the results, but with the impetus for such an experiment. Increasingly, tourists are using AI to plan their holidays. I myself have done it to varying degrees of success; as ever, don’t trust everything you read. This is bad news for mid-tier travel agencies, whose clientele is more likely to cut costs on bespoke itineraries.

Is this how things end for them?

'Wilderness,’ said the American essayist Edward Abbey, ‘is not a luxury, but a necessity of the human spirit.’ He was right — and there is no wilderness like the wilderness of wet sand all around you.

Depending on where you draw the upper limit for an island, Britain is the ninth largest in the world with, according to some reports, the 13th longest coastline. However, it is only when you come to understand that, thanks to our huge average tidal range, we have the largest intertidal area of any island on Earth that you begin to grasp the sheer magnitude of the ‘land in-between’ — the land that is neither wholly wet nor wholly dry. Our estuaries alone extend to more than 2,000 square miles, an area only slightly smaller than Devon. Variously dotted with starfish, snipe, sea defences and sandcastles, it is an ethereal, shapeshifting habitat that has tempted and fascinated us since time immemorial. Walking, for some of us at least, has become the true way to see it.

Generally, we cross the sea on foot for one of three reasons: to get to a tidal island, to take a short cut or out of sheer curiosity. In the act of making that crossing, we are putting our lives in the hands of the accuracy of the tide tables (and, importantly, of our reading of them) and articulating a deep innate faith within us that there won’t be some natural disaster that pulls us helplessly out into the impatient sea.

I first became fascinated by tidal islands, of which we have 43 principal examples off the British coast, during childhood holidays on the Isle of Mull. I was reading Kidnapped one evening in front of the fire when my grandmother idly mentioned that Tràigh Gheal beach on the nearby island of Erraid was supposed to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson. She wasn’t a great one for health and safety, my grandmother, so it was the work of a moment to persuade her to let this rather dippy 11-year-old child cycle down to Fionnphort on his own and try the tidal crossing for himself with no more than a copy of the Ross of Mull tide tables in the pocket of his shorts. Having made the crossing, I exulted for an hour or so in the sensation of otherness, aloneness and adventure that my new island life provided me, until the trickle of incoming saltwater started to become rather more of a flood than a trickle, and I made my wet, but happy way back to my bike and the road home. The die was cast: I had tasted the honeydew of a life in between.

Years passed and I gradually ‘collected’ half of the remaining tidal islands, generally by happening to find myself in the vicinity rather than deliberately planning the visit. The names tripped off the tongue as if from Gothic novels: Agatha Christie’s Burgh Island in Devon, St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Scolt Head in Norfolk. For Hilbre Island in the Dee estuary, the excuse was wader watching; for Gugh in the Scillies, it was bona fide seabird research; for Cramond Island near Edinburgh, it was all about native oysters. In North Uist, I walked 10 miles out of my way to cross the sands to Vallay and 10 miles back, simply because I had seen a picture of it on a postcard for sale in Lochmaddy.

Possibly the best-known sea path of all is the final three-mile stretch of the Pilgrim’s Way onto the holy island of Lindisfarne. For 13 centuries, from the establishment of the monastery in AD635 until the causeway road was opened in 1954, this was the only way onto the island for those who didn’t have access to a boat: where your feet now tread, so trod before you monks, traders, illustrators of manuscripts, Viking raiders, pilgrims and penitents. The sense of personal insignificance brought about by your place in a millennium-long line of similar travellers is good for you. These days, we have tide tables, weather forecasts and a long line of marker posts to guide us; back then, I suspect that it was more about faith in the creator and a gutful of common sense.

From personal experience, the best time to walk to Lindisfarne is early to mid morning, ahead of a midday low tide, for it is then that the flat ‘artist’s light’ creates possibly the best visual backdrop for a personal pilgrimage. Soundless save perhaps the chittering of a passing whimbrel or the piping call of some foraging oystercatchers, you are free to create around you a temporary sense of otherness that has become almost impossible to achieve in the busy world outside. Everything around you except the looming island ahead is in the horizontal plane, distance hard to judge and mirages shimmering in the background. Largely, you will be on your own, as the vast majority of the roughly 650,000 annual visitors to Lindisfarne drive over the tarmac road on the nearby causeway, but the people you may meet on their return journey will likely be adventurous souls like you and will see and treat you as one of a band of brothers or sisters rather than merely another tourist heading for yet another coffee shop.

We have all taken simple short cuts across bays at low tide, for it is the nature of a bay to be a semicircle of sand between two headlands; doing so is almost a rite of passage within an annual seaside holiday. The godfather of these short cuts is the one across the vast expanse of 120 square mile Morecambe Bay, where professionally guided walks that are available at the northern end are in sharp contrast to the terrible (and completely avoidable) events of the night of February 5, 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle pickers were trapped and drowned by the incoming tide. One-off tragedies should not necessarily change the course of centuries of adventurous spirit, but their lessons should be vigorously taught. The sea can be dangerous and tides move fast and relentlessly over flat expanses of mud.

In the end, it was sheer curiosity that drove me to walk Britain’s most celebrated sea path, the six-mile Broomway that stretches from the Great Wakering Steps in Essex to Foulness Island, so called because the path was once marked by a series of upturned brooms. For at least 500 years, before the bridge to the island was built in 1922, the Broomway, now known cheerfully in some quarters as ‘Britain’s deadliest footpath’, was the only way that people could access the place by foot. To this day, no one can really say if the ridge, which runs 400 yards or so parallel to the shore, is a natural one or the result of centuries of human effort, but it doesn’t really matter. More than 100 people are thought to have met their end through misjudging the tides or, more likely, becoming disorientated in the mist and heading for the only visible lights, which happen to be on the far, Kentish shore.

For safety, I went with a guide and a handful of others, a group that included a commodity trader equipped for an assault on Everest, a lady from Vancouver in head-to-toe pretty pink and quite the ugliest dog that I have ever clapped eyes on. In water that was never less than a couple of inches deep, but never more than six, we were led eastwards across the flat expanse of Maplin Sands, as Kevin the guide told us the stories that we had all come to hear. It is only in the past 100–150 years that our coast has become a place of relative safety, so it was striking to listen to tales of essential night journeys across the sand, of smuggling and of shipwrecks, but also to confirm for ourselves once again the deep cultural ties we have lost with what went on in these places before. Back then, this was all someone’s workplace; these days, it is a pleasant morning’s stroll.

Sea paths have always helped to keep me in touch with my inner seafarer and rekindle the flame of my endless fascination with the liminal edgelands of our solid island. To walk through water, with sea on either side of you, is to gain a deeper and more useful knowledge of what it is to be an islander, something Sir Antony Gormley tries to explain in his giant installation on Crosby Beach, Merseyside, Another Place.

‘You can’t cross the sea,’ said the Bengali philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, ‘merely by standing and staring at the water.’ Precisely. Sea paths stand proud as a beacon of hope at a time where the search for adventure has been remorselessly compromised by one generation applying its own selfish sense of hyper-caution on the next. Long may we celebrate them.

This article originally appeared in the September 24 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside:

Life in the sloe lane

John Wright steps out in search of Nature’s hedgerow bounty, from sloes to sea buckthorn and bullaces to blackberries

The roads less travelled

Now you see them, now you don’t: Roger Morgan-Grenville treads the ephemeral sea paths of Britain, those often-ancient routes at the mercy of the tides

A stitch in time

Deborah Nicholls-Lee unearths Mr Darcy’s shirt, Bertie Wooster’s dressing gown and Poldark’s tricorn hat in a fascinating trawl through the Cosprop wardrobes

Property market

A quartet of significant West Country houses is seeking buyers, reports Penny Churchill

Properties of the week

A Devon longhouse, Cornwall cottage and Somerset thatch catch Arabella Youens’s eye

When your art is in the right place

To whom do the experts turn for the best in framing, restoring and valuing? Leading art and antique dealers open their little black books for Amelia Thorpe

Leslie MacLeod Miller’s favourite painting

The impresario picks a portrait of a 19th-century singing sensation

Country-house treasures

The fortunes of a Cumbrian castle rest with the ‘Luck of Muncaster’, finds John Goodall

A Regency prospect

Steven Brindle looks at the remarkable story behind a fine Georgian creation — Samuel Wyatt’s Belmont House in Kent

The legacy

Emma Hughes toasts the genius of Dennis Potter, the man who gave us the darkly comic and gritty Singing Detective

Beginning to see the light

John Lewis-Stempel and his dogs are up with the skylark to witness the dawning of a spectacular September day

Luxury

Amie Elizabeth White on tartan, tweed, timepieces and fruity jewels, plus a few of Victoria Pendleton’s favourite things

Interiors

Amelia Thorpe admires the makeover of a guest bedroom at a Scottish country house and picks the best bedside tables

Plum advice

Charles Quest-Ritson shares his favourite forms of plum, gage, mirabelle and damson from the 20-plus varieties he has grown

Slightly foxed

Second-hand bookshops can be a goldmine of gardening wisdom, says John Hoyland

Scale model

David Profumo is transported back to childhood by the spiny, swashbuckling stickleback

Travel

Mark Hedges takes a break from reality on Bryher, a heather-clad haven in the Isles of Scilly

Arts & antiques

Art dealer John Martin tells Carla Passino why he can never part with a panel he stumbled upon by Nigerian sculptor Asiru Olatunde

Fans of remote Scottish castles: rejoice! As, at long last, the rejuvenation of the 16th-century Saddell Castle, located by the beach in Kintyre, Argyll and Bute, has been completed. The castle sleeps eight people, and canine companions, if you have them, and is now available to rent, if you would like. With weak and, in places, no mobile signal at all, it looks to be the perfect place for a full digital detox. A steal at just over £20 per person, per night (if you can rustle up seven other guests), the castle offers sweeping coastal views from its windows and crenellated rooftop walk.

Extensive repair works were undertaken to preserve the Category A-listed building and open it for bookings (from August onwards). Along with masonry repairs to the building's exterior, there was a complete reharling in a gauged hot lime mortar. Roofing works were also undertaken and additional bathrooms added inside the castle.

In 1508, it was chosen by the Bishop of Argyll as his new castle and described as ‘a fayre pyle, and a strong,’ as it was located near the shore and the mouth of a small river. The Campbell family took it on in about 1600 and it was theirs for almost 400 years. Best of all, the flooring inside of the front door is removable, so you can booby-trap any unwelcome visitors Scooby-Doo-style, plunging them into a pit below. One of the reviews on the booking website reads ‘a great location for a murder mystery game’ and I wholeheartedly agree, especially if you tell your tipsy guests about the trap-door, but neglect to tell them where it is.

The ancient ruins of a nearby abbey are rife for exploring and full of medieval headstones and effigies marking burial sites, some of which date back to the 1300s and 1400s. The bay that the castle looks over is owned by the conservation charity The Landmark Trust, which means that along with the guests of a nearby mansion and four cottages, the beach is all yours — although you may have to share with an array of sea birds, seals and one very friendly otter, all of whom are regular visitors. Also nearby is The Machrihanish Seabird & Wildlife Observatory, ideal for bird watchers, and there are boat trips around the islands or the Mull of Kintyre, Sanda and Aisla Craig, where more seals and puffins live. If you’re a keen golfer, it’s also an ideal base for the many courses located around Kintyre.

If you don’t plan on booking a holiday there, worry not, as Saddell Castle has two upcoming open days (on September 20 and 21). The remaining five Landmark properties on Saddell Bay will also be open to visitors: Saddell Lodge, Saddell House, Ferryman’s Cottage, Cul-na-Shee (which means ‘nook of peace’ in Gaelic, and where I could imagine myself spending many a cosy night by the fire as the waves rage outside) and Shore Cottage. They are also available to rent for a holiday, or murder mysteries. An Antony Gormley sculpture titled GRIP IV and a bothy are also sites of interest on the coastland.

Caroline Stanford, a historian at The Landmark Trust, said: ‘Saddell Castle was one of Landmark's first restorations in the 1970s and it's great now to have secured its future for another 50 years through this latest hit of comprehensive repair and internal improvements.’

‘Its setting is incredibly romantic, standing proud on a promontory in beautiful Saddell Bay, looking across the Kilbrannan Sound to the Isle of Arran. The wildlife is incredible — you have seals for company and can watch the tide coming in and out over Antony Gormley's sculpture, GRIP IV, which stands on the rocks below.’

More information can be found about staying at Saddell Castle can be found on The Landmark Trust's website.

I’ve always wanted to have a bath outside, in which I could languish peacefully, looking up at a wide-open night sky full of stars. At Thornfalcon, a new vineyard, farm and ever evolving rustic idyll in Somerset, you can. The copper roll top in question sits beside a luxurious new shepherd’s hut with views towards Thorn Hill, beyond neat rows of Chardonnay vines interspersed with little black boxes that tune into Radio 4 if ever a deer comes near — very civilised.

The Vine Hut is just one of three farm stays on the property.

Thornfalcon Winery & Press represents a dream realised for owners Sophie Brendel and Panu Long, who decided to up sticks and leave London for this wild and wonderful 40-acre microclimate in the West Country, sandwiched between the Mendips, Quantocks and Blackdown Hills, in 2022. ‘I'll never forget when we first got here, that first day, just feeling like we’d hit a magic jackpot, walking outside in this beautiful place. It still hits me even now,’ says Sophie.

As former director of audiences, commercial and digital at the V&A, she has ‘an eye for colour and pattern,’ she tells me — definitely an understatement. Sophie’s boho-rustic-English-country style hits a perfect note, as evident in the renovations she has undertaken. She also has a sound business head and pots of ambition. The amount of future projects she has planned is a little dizzying — from events and art spaces to a wildflower meadow and a spa treatment room in an old boatshed, and everything in between, and that’s before we’ve touched on the vineyard and cider press that her husband Panu, a former mixologist, has created (incidentally, I can attest that Panu makes a stellar cocktail).

The previous owners of Manor Farm, Thornfalcon, had discovered a 150-year-old cider press, buried deep in mud in a barn, and restored it to full use. Sophie and Panu now use it to make their delicious apple juice and cider. It’s proper old-fashioned labour, requiring a couple of people at once; luckily, they joke, people don’t break down as easily as machines. And there is joy to be had in ‘bringing back traditional cider-making methods to this farm, as it would have been 150 years ago,’ says Panu. Apple varieties in the orchard are mostly local. ‘A lot of them are named after places near here, like Stembridge Cluster,’ explains Sophie. ‘Some are named after people, like Porter’s Perfection.’ ‘Mainly we have Kingston Black,’ adds Panu, ‘a particularly noble cider apple. It’s a bit tricky to grow, but cidermakers love the juice.’ Being Somerset, there are quite a few good farmhouse cider producers in the area. So rather than adding more of the same, Panu decided to produce something different. Standing beside several giant barrels, he explains that they are making the ‘light, delicious stuff that will come in a Champagne bottle’. It’s sparkling, slightly lower in alcohol, but 100% apple. ‘It’s similar to what you get in Normandy,’ he says. ‘They call it bouché over there. Here, we call it keeved. You drink it out of wine glass rather than a pint. It's quite labour-intensive to make cider this way, storing the apples for weeks and weeks to get lots of pectin, fermenting them between 8 and 10 degrees… But we think it gives a really wonderful finish.’

‘We only use apples grown here in our orchard,’ adds Sophie. ‘It is zero spray, hand-picked, hand-pressed… uber-organic.’ Sparkling wine is also in process, something that takes a minimum of seven years from planting the first vine to filling an actual bottle. ‘Eventually, our goal is to produce sparkling wine, still white and still rosé, as well as the juices and cider.’ Completing the cycle, the residue from cider and wine making goes onto the compost heap, which feeds the vegetable garden… which in turn feeds Sophie and Panu’s family and anyone who comes to stay.

Upon our arrival at The Coach House (above), a characterful two-bedroom conversion full of reclaimed wood, polished concrete, antiques sourced from France, Spain and Morocco, Pooky lamps and some very pretty wallpaper by Tess Newall, we were greeted by an enormous hamper of courgettes, tomatoes, potatoes, broad beans, peas and fragrant mint from the kitchen garden. A further hamper of cherries, apples and peaches was beside it, plus cakes from a local bakery, as well as a collection of meats from the butcher in Ilminster (where Alice Temperley has her outlet). We drank as much Thornfalcon apple juice as we could get our hands on. The bathrooms were full of essential-oil enhanced products from sister Mary Temperley’s brand MAKE (the citrus, lavender, eucalyptus and lemongrass hand wash smelt so heavenly I immediately ordered it online), which has its base at nearby Burrow Hill Cider Farm, home to Somerset Cider Brandy.

As it was early summer, we spent a lot of time with the children in the garden, trying to stop them from picking underripe walnuts from the tree in our private meadow (sorry), collecting eggs and wandering through the woods up to the bucolic two-acre lake — fringed with bulrushes as lakes always are in storybooks — to see swans splash about with their fluffy cygnets. We enjoyed a bit of splashing ourselves in the lakeside hot tub, a nod to Panu’s Finnish heritage. Even our youngest, age two, loved the sauna (thoughtfully set to a low enough temperature for little ones) and cold shower afterwards on repeat.

The aforementioned Vine Hut, designed by Sophie, is decorated in a similarly vibrant, Matilda Goad meets French rustic style, with reclaimed wood floors and walls, a kitchen painted in Edward Bulmer’s Invisible Green and a bedroom, beside the sitting room with log burner, adorned in Lake August nasturtium wallpaper. Lastly, the newly converted Lambing Shed sleeps two, with a similar set up, plus an outdoor wood-fired, wood-clad bath among the apple trees. All three retreats have 400-threadcount bedlinens and feather-and-duck down mattress toppers on kingsize beds.

A further cabin, recently spruced up with a bedroom, kitchen, sitting room and bathroom, is offered to those wanting a placement via the WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) scheme. ‘For those taking part, it's a way of seeing the world and being part of a local community,’ Sophie explains. ‘WWOOFers work for around five hours a day, with the afternoons off, in return for room and board. We've met really wonderful people this way — some who've never done anything like it before and others with a particularly keen interest in organic farming — even couples from Australia and New Zealand.’

A simple wander around the farm reveals plenty of other buildings ripe for conversion — Sophie and Panu have big plans. When I asked them if their move to create this idyll and share it, too, was a business or a lifestyle choice, they told me it was both. ‘It’s a massive labour of love,’ says Sophie. ‘There’s something special about what happens when Nature and the land come together with the alchemy of the creative process. We want to make it even more special because we live here, too — this is our home. It's a place that we absolutely love. Having people to stay is a wonderful way to share it, while helping to finance development.’

She wonders at how ‘every day here, something changes. I’ll go up to London for a day and I'll come back and myriad flowers will have bloomed. Even if I've only been away for a short time, I like to pad around the vegetable garden and see what's happened.’

A night at Thornfalcon starts from £125 (gypsy caravan add on available from £70); visit www.thornfalcon.com for more information and to book

Two of the greatest moments of my life in golf have come in Ireland.

One was when I was on holiday on the south-west coast, a wide-eyed kid playing the 11^th hole of the Old Course at Ballybunion, the greatest hole on one of the world’s great links golf courses, and hit my 4-iron shot to 3ft from the pin. I’m a pretty terrible golfer, but the joy of the sport is that even the worst of us can walk this sort of hallowed turf, and even the worst of us can pull off the odd miracle shot. For both to come together at once was a bit of a winning lottery ticket.

The other moment? A decade and a half later, in the stands behind the first tee on the opening morning of the 2006 Ryder Cup at a golf resort called The K Club. The comedy warm-up was provided, genuinely unbelievably, by Tiger Woods. He was at the apex of his skills, having won The Open in July and the US PGA Championship in August… but on a grey September morning outside Dublin, he hoiked his opening tee shot into the lake.

I thought that would be the highlight of the morning, but not long afterwards Darren Clarke’s arrival eclipsed it in breathtaking fashion. Just six weeks before, Clarke had lost his first wife, Heather, after a long battle with cancer, and the ovation he received — fuelled by sympathy, gratitude, affection and a thousand other things — remains the most astonishing outpouring of emotion I’ve ever witnessed at a sporting event. I still get goosebumps nearly two decades later, just typing these words.

The K Club has held a special place in Irish golf ever since that week, a charmed three days which saw the European team record a record victory. Earlier this year, almost 19 years on, I returned to The K Club, and walked out on to the balcony overlooking the 18^th green when Ian Woosnam lifted the trophy, and Clarke downed a pint of Guinness to roars of approval from the crowd. The course looks almost the same as I remembered it, albeit with a routing change which has reversed the two nines, while keeping the 9^th and 18^th holes as they were.

The holes weave around the parkland that surrounds the enormous Straffan House, running alongside and back and forth across the River Liffey, most memorable at the beautiful 8^th hole whose green is reached via a 175-year-old footbridge. The bridge isn’t quite as old as the house, which was built in 1832; but it is a lot older than the golf course, which was created by Arnold Palmer 1990 as part of a redevelopment by the entrepreneur Michael Smurfit, including turning the great house into a sprawling hotel.

The K Club was the first of several such developments in and around this central belt of Ireland, straddling Co Kildare, Co Meath and Coo Wicklow, the three counties which form a ring around Dublin. Ireland’s very greatest golf courses — including Portrush, Portmarnock, Ballybunion, Royal County Down and half a dozen more — are all seaside links, but the likes of The K Club, Carton House and Druid’s Glen give is a beautiful string of excellent inland courses too. For visitors, that means more variety on offer — arguably more so than Scotland — and the tourist board are leaning in to this, marketing the area as part of Ireland’s Ancient East.

Much of the sporting drama at The K Club’s Ryder Cup revolved around the amount of water on the course, and while that’s great for spectators, it’s harder for the golfers themselves. The Mark O’Meara course at nearby Carton House is far more forgiving for mere mortals, with plenty of space meaning that you’ll still have fun even with a few wayward drives. It too is based around an enormous house itself, the family seat of the FitzGerald family, who were the Earls of Kildare and Dukes of Leinster for over 700 years, with the house as it stands today essentially appearing as it did when built in 1745. Some elements are even older: the Tyrconnell Tower, standing proudly atop the highest point, is 17^th century, and before the course’s routing came up this way must have been truly in the middle of nowhere.

The Carton House estate originally ran to 70,000 acres; today, it’s ‘only’ 1,100, but that’s four or five times what you’d normally expect for a pair of golf courses, as they have here (the other was designed by Colin Montgomerie).

The space is well used, giving a wonderfully open aspect on most of the holes, and the sweeping changes of elevation are also superbly integrated — particularly at the winding par-5 9th, absolutely magical par-3 14^th hole on the O’Meara course, where you shoot to a green that is well over a hundred feet below, and which is ringed by a loop of the River Rye. It's followed by the equally catching 15th — a par-5 — and 16th, a par-3 over water, which form the club's own 'Amen Corner'.

Both The K Club and Carton House are well-established stops for visiting golfers, and Killeen Castle is working hard to earn the same status. A different legendary designer — this time Jack Nicklaus — laid out the golf course, which has enormous, hugely undulating greens that are kept in perfect condition. It’s a very playable, enjoyable course for all levels of golfer, from the inviting, downhill first tee shot, to the holes which — just as at k Club and Carton House — play back and forth alongside the meandering of a river, up to the finale played to a green that sits below Killeen Castle itself. Like The K Club, it has been the site of international competition: The Solheim Cup, the women’s equivalent of the Ryder Cup, was held here in 2011.

There has been a castle on this site since 1172, thought he building as it stands dates to an 1841 rebuild by the 9^th Earl of Fingall, who commissioned what he wanted to be a miniature Windsor Castle. It was burnt out in 1981 in an IRA arson attack, gutting the interior almost completely. While the course, modern clubhouse and accommodation have been up and running for a long time, the redevelopment of the castle itself has been slow going, and while the structure is solid, it’s still a wreck inside.

The latest hope is that the planned investment will come through in the next year or so, and that by 2028 or 2029 Killeen Castle will be open as a truly unique 40-room hotel. Irish golf has a lot to shout about — from hosting the 2025 Open at Royal Portrush to Rory McIlroy becoming only the sixth man in history to win all four of golf's major championships — and this will be yet anothe reason to get excited about it.

For more information on golf in Ireland visit www.ireland.com/golf

The UK's only triangular lido is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, still very much in use. Opened in May 1935, Jubilee Pool at Penzance in Cornwall was named to mark the 25th year of George V’s reign. It was the culmination of a slum clearance and town-improvement programme, the like of which had never been seen in the ancient Cornish borough and the mayor looked forward to it being a ‘source of health, strength and pleasure’ for locals and visitors alike. Swimming saw a huge surge in popularity between the wars as leisure and physical fitness became social and economic priorities. This was the era when sunbathing became fashionable, hiking in the fresh air became a pastime and the Youth Hostels Association was founded. Open-air pools sprang up across the country and every seaside resort worth its salt had to have one.

It may seem counterintuitive that the largest and most innovative pools were built on the coast, but the crowds heading to the seaside were increasing every summer and the tides did not shift their erratic patterns to cater for the demands of holidaymakers. Purpose-built pools generally took their water from the sea, but were accessible for safe swimming throughout the day and, thanks to floodlighting, stayed open into the night, too. Despite the remote location of Penzance, far from urban centres, the arrival of the railways in the 1860s had brought tourists in numbers for the first time. As the town’s natural beach had been shrinking for decades, however, it was hoped that the spectacular new pool would attract visitors and provide an economic boost to the area.

Members of the Penzance Swimming Association and Penzance Water Polo Club were equally keen to have a proper pool, as their annual matches had had to be held in the Floating Dock, where ‘swimmers contend with potato peelings from ships, oil, coal, dust, china clay, if nothing worse, and the dressing accommodation consists of a cargo transit shed’. Historians have routinely undervalued the architectural contribution of borough engineers and architects, but in Capt Frank Latham, Penzance council assuredly had the best man for the job. Latham had been employed as borough engineer and surveyor for 36 years, he knew the place intimately and was also a national expert on marine works and sea defences, having written the book The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defences in 1903 and several articles on the subject. His expertise in employing the natural geography of the shoreline meant that Penzance got its pool for a mere £14,000.

A report on the opening of Jubilee Pool in The Cornishman stated that it was not only a fine piece of engineering, but also a work of art. ‘The monotony of straight walls and right angles — the domain of the compass and ruler — has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines — an adaptation of cubism to the terraces and diving platforms which enhances the effect and makes the whole so pleasing to the eye.’

For the pool’s eastern side, Latham made use of the Battery Rocks, an established bathing area that offered natural protection from eastern sea storms. A substantial granite sea wall made up the northern side with the two connected by a new concrete arm. In the middle of this arm was the Cove Rock, which Latham incorporated into the design to act as a central support, cleverly rounding the structure either side so that oncoming waves were broken and swept along the curves, their force expended by the time they reached the beach.

Informed by science and geology as it was, Latham admitted that he got his design inspiration ‘from seeing a gull alight on the sea, and the lines of the pool and its contour suggest this’. The largest sea-water pool in the country, it covers three-quarters of an acre and holds some five million litres, re-filled on the high tide. Contemporaries praised the ‘streamlines’, the concrete bathing boxes or changing rooms and the ‘cubist style’ seen in the interior steps of Jubilee Pool, the whole given a white sheen of snowcrete render. These days, it is more likely to be described as Art Deco, an increasingly catch-all term for buildings of the 1920s and 1930s.

The same is true for the nearby Tinside Lido at Plymouth, Devon, which has many similarities with Penzance, not least the fact that it opened 90 years ago. Plymouth’s pool also juts out from the rocky shore, making the most of superb views across the Sound and was again entrusted to the borough engineer, a man named John S. Wibberley. He had already designed changing rooms for an existing open-water swimming area next to where the semi-circular pool would be built. The bigger plan was linked to Plymouth’s grant of city status in 1928 and intentions to enhance its tourism potential.

The first major construction work was on the Tinside Colonnade, an overtly Moderne promenade and sun terrace with a cantilevered section supporting Hoe Road as it skirted the clifftops. From this upper level, bathers and spectators made their way through a stair tower with three narrow full-height windows, down to the lower changing rooms and pool. At most open-air pools, the key architectural elements were the extras, the changing spaces, tiers of seating, cafés and diving stages that provided the essential elements of a lido. Janet Smith, the author of Liquid Assets, describes this interwar building type as a ‘magical oasis’, modern, sexy and ‘unlike any form of pleasure park the British public had ever known’.

Stylistically, the look of these places evolved over time and early examples relied more heavily on Classical forms than has generally been acknowledged. The first seaside lido opened in Scarborough’s South Bay, North Yorkshire, in July 1915, its construction permitted during wartime because borough engineer Harry W. Smith had designed it to be part of a new scheme of sea defences. Smith had previously laid out the Italian gardens around the famous Spa Pavilion and continued this theme in the Tuscan colonnades that sheltered 137 tiled dressing boxes above the pool. Grand Edwardian staircases took spectators to a rooftop seating area, as the pumping plant and laundry room were housed in an Italianate block with full-height round-headed arches across its façade.

A year later, the well-to-do west-coast resort of St Annes, Lancashire, opened its newest attraction ‘in the shape of a “Roman” open-air swimming bath’. The Fleetwood Chronicle praised the buildings by Accrington architect Fred Harrison as ‘all of classical and beautiful design, their façades adorned with Ionic pillars and their flat roofs laid out as promenades’. If nearby Blackpool needed a spur, this was it. In 1923, borough engineer Francis Wood and borough architect John Charles Robinson responded with a structure billed as ‘A New Colosseum’, which, at £80,000, cost eight times as much as the St Annes baths. Customers entered under a huge Beaux-Arts dome into a reception and café building that proved swimming pools could also serve as vehicles for displaying civic pride. The D-shaped pool was ringed by a concourse one-third of a mile long and, when full, the oval amphitheatre could accommodate 8,000 spectators and 1,500 swimmers. On the landward side, double-height Doric colonnades curved in front of the changing cubicles.

Southport’s Sea Bathing Lake of 1928 on Merseyside was a less grandiose variation on this model. With a budget of £60,000, its architectural impact was less formal, the glazed dome of the café flanked by a colonnaded pergola. The municipal impetus for these schemes was not merely about providing amenities; building works were also intended to take unemployed men off the street. Without welfare benefits and at a time of economic depression, Southport’s pool gave employment to some 300 local labourers.

Pool construction continued apace and, in August 1931, Reynold’s Newspaper declared that Scotland had ‘suddenly gone bathing mad — community bathing mad’. Queues were reported at recently opened ‘ponds’, as they were known, and at Prestwick in Ayrshire, the new facility was credited with stemming the tide of visitors to English resorts, with the town ‘full to overflowing’. Small wonder then that nearly £100,000 was collectively projected for ponds at Ayr, Saltcoats and Largs in Ayrshire, Rothesay on the Isle of Bute and Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae.

Edinburgh’s seaside resort of Portobello became home to Scotland’s largest lido in 1936. The first in Britain to have a wave machine, it enjoyed the rare privilege of heated water thanks to its location next to a power station. Its most sophisticated architectural element was the cantilevered roof of the west grandstand, but its café can rightly be described as Art Deco, with a stepped roof line emphasised by bands of green tiles either side of a square central clock. A similar design had already appeared at New Brighton’s 1934 Bathing Pool, one of the biggest ever built in Britain, covering 4½ acres at the northern tip of the Wirral Peninsula. Sun worshippers were well-catered for here, as the interior of the café by the vast D-shaped pool was flooded with natural light from a barrel-vaulted ceiling of ‘glasscrete’ bricks.

It was at Morecambe in Lancashire, however, that lido spending peaked in the £130,000 Super Swimming Stadium of 1936, designed by architects Kenneth Cross and Cecil Sutton. The name acknowledged how far these open-air pools had become sites for mass entertainment, the capacity for spectators always far exceeding that for swimmers, thanks to the popularity of galas, diving displays, aquashows and beauty contests.

Among the nation’s many smaller pools, the most critically acclaimed remains Saltdean Lido just outside Brighton, East Sussex. Designed by R. W. H. Jones for the company creating a brand-new seaside estate on the edge of the South Downs, the pool’s curved northern side is hugged by a superb Modernist building with clear echoes of the ground-breaking De La Warr Pavilion at nearby Bexhill-on-Sea. Its two wings of ground-floor changing rooms are topped with sun terraces flanking a first-floor café that curves out to greet the water supported on slim concrete piers. After years of community campaigning, the pool and its glorious glazed buildings have now been fully restored.

It proved hard for the behemoths of the genre to survive, as holidaymakers sought foreign sunshine and indoor leisure centres promised more comfortable swimming in temperature-controlled environments. Even listing could not save the extraordinarily sculptural concrete diving stage at Weston-super-Mare’s 1937 pool, which was deemed unsafe and out of fashion in 1982.

The recent return to favour of cold-water swimming means that, a century on from their original heyday, we now regret the passing of these interwar lidos and, where they remain in derelict form, locals are seeking to bring them back into use. Work is underway on restoring the buildings at Tarlair Lido in Aberdeenshire and groups are fund-raising to renew both Grange-over-Sands Lido on the north-west coast in Cumbria and Tynemouth Lido on the north-east in Tyne and Wear. A new network called Future Lidos has been created to support these campaigns in the hope that more open-air seaside pools will join Penzance, Plymouth and Saltdean in having a viable future.

This feature originally appeared in the July 2, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

I like to think of myself as a Scottish laird (actually, I am only an Italian baron), but my modest demesne is a hill farm 1,100ft up a glen in Highland Perthshire. We bought our home in 1998: to locals, we are still incomers. We look out across the great sweep of the Vale of Atholl; behind our ‘mansion’ towers Beinn a’ Ghlo with its 19 secret corries (once the haunt of witches) and resplendent to the south-west is another Munro, Schiehallion — Gaelic for ‘the fairy hill of the Caledonians’. In the 10th century, M’Intosh of ‘Tereynie’ held court in the River Tilt nearby — he liked to string up the odd clansman pour encourager les autres.

Most of the panoramic vista is part of the huge Atholl estates; we can just see the distant tip of Blair Castle’s flagstaff below us. Our house was built a century ago for the then Duke’s sister and her husband (like us, they were David and Helen), and the view is a mixture of the wild and the managed — moor, park and birkwoods, with no stapled-in windfarms. This is arguably God’s Own County; they say Pontius Pilate was born at Fortingall.

When we moved beyond the ‘Tartan Curtain’, there were jokes about needing a Scottish passport and misgivings about rain. Actually, it’s the unrelenting winter wind that gets to you and we do need our own snowplough. I admit that, slogging up our steep brae through the springtime sleet, I sometimes pine for the pavements of Mayfair, but, if it’s shopping you miss, our local emporium is House of Bruar.

This landscape is breathtaking. Behind us rises unkempt moorland with ling heather and bosses of rubicund moss; in season there’s a soundtrack of cuckoo, lapwing and that bubble-stream song of curlews. Red and roe deer have historically abounded. When Mary, Queen of Scots visited Blair in 1564, the day’s deer drive involved a team of 2,000 beaters and the bag (to bow and hounds) was 360 slain, plus five wolves. Nae rewilders back then.

The Tilt is a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Tay; one fluky morning, I landed three salmon from the same pool. We are within striking distance of numerous fishing hotspots, as our nearest, low-key township (Pitlochry) is reckoned to be the topographical centre of Scotland, but I don’t have to go far to cast a line: outside my library window is a bonny little trout loch, as the local osprey well knows.

The London Sleeper train handily stops at the old ducal station in Blair Atholl, so we can soon reach the Soft South if the mood takes us. ‘Whatever do you do up there?’ enquire certain English infidels. As Louis Armstrong replied, when asked to explain jazz: ‘Lady, if ya gotta ask, ya’ll never know!’

Local highlight
Blair Castle and the Bruar Falls

Local lowlight
February

Local secret
Rami’s Pitlochry Bakery

David Profumo is Country Life's fishing correspondent. His memoir ‘The Lightning Thread’ is out in paperback (Scribner UK, £9.99)

The Isle of Wight, sometime in the early 1990s. I was coming up for six years old and had recently moved to the island’s rugged south-west coast from suburban Worcestershire. Out on a family walk above the village of Brighstone — forested downland tumbling to a sandstone ridge, dotted with gorse and with dramatic views of the Channel — something loomed out of the mizzle. A gargantuan, grey green rock of perplexing heft, rising 13ft from the soil to meet the evening sky: Mottistone Longstone.

The Neolithic-era monument was, to me, an unprecedented sight; as mystically unknowable as it was tactile, sitting on the edge of a contoured strip of earth and all the more atmospheric for the isolated setting and terrible weather. As I recall, a barn owl actually floated out of the gloaming. I’ve been entranced ever since.

The Longstone is only one of the thousands of ancient sites that Britain has to offer. The A-listers need no introduction: Stonehenge, of course, the rubbernecking of which from the A303 is a classic English summer pastime; Avebury, the world’s largest stone circle and sacred complex, subsuming an entire Wiltshire village; the inverted green cupola of Silbury Hill nearby, Europe’s largest manmade mound; the Neolithic Heart of Orkney, a collection of circles, chambers and prehistoric houses of timeworn splendour and prestige.

However, to varying degrees of size and impact, these features of the landscape — from lonely moorland megaliths to grand stone rings, coffin-like cist graves, dolmen tombs, subterranean fogou tunnels, earth-covered barrows, rock-pile cairns, gargantuan chalk figures and lofty hill forts — are ubiquitous. The country strains under the weight of ancient rock, if only we know where to look.

Much of it, too, is rich with folklore. Take Mên-an-Tol: two upright stones and a circular rock with a holed-out centre between them, secluded on Cornwall’s wind-whipped West Penwith moor and brimming with energy associated with fertility and healing. Women have long clambered through the hole to encourage pregnancy and faerie changeling babies were supposedly passed through to return them to human form. In a beech grove along the Oxfordshire Ridgeway is Wayland’s Smithy, an eerie barrow mound with two chambers and totemic sarsens (sandstone blocks) at the entrance. Wayland was said to be a magical blacksmith; leaving your horse and a coin outside the mound overnight would see the steed shod by sunrise.

More incongruous is Rudston Monolith: looming over the cemetery of All Saints Rudston, it’s the tallest standing stone in the country, let alone the East Riding of Yorkshire, and the name — rood or cross stone — Christianises its heathen origins. At the far end of the scale, Gwâl y Filiast is a squat Carmarthenshire cromlech (Welsh for a chamber tomb, shaped like a rudimentary house) on a misty woodland ridge above the River Taf, with four chubby uprights and a stocky capstone. The name is a bastardisation of ‘Lair of the Grey Hound Bitch’ (meaning wolf), although some have posited that it might have been a kennel for King Arthur’s dog.

Up in Gwynedd, Bryn Cader Faner rewards persistence: a skeletal Bronze Age crown in the back of beyond, it has 18 jagged, quartz-veined slates in a 30ft ring, with three miles of boggy hike to get there. Both treasure hunters and the army have tried their worst, the latter using it for target practice during the Second World War.

Scotland has more than its share of compelling sites. Near Inverness lie Clava Cairns; three monumental piles of Bronze Age pebbles that gave their name to the 50 or so similar mounds around the region, as well as serving as a location for the raunchy time-hopping television adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels. Lochbuie, the only stone circle on Mull, comprises eight hunks of granite in the shadow of Ben Buie, ringed by hot-pink rhododendrons: you reach it via an atmospheric approach of white-painted rocks and makeshift plank bridges through a wet pasture.

Even at smaller scales, these are all wildly impressive structures, feats of almost lunatic determination — and we still have no firm idea of what purpose most of them served. Archaeologists continue to speculate on the funerary, ritual or celestial functions they may have held in the communities that made them, but the answers are almost beside the point. The visual appeal of these ancient sites — and the quandary of how they were built — are as magnetic now as they were then.

‘These remains spark interest that wandering around a city wouldn’t,’ explains Vicki Cummings, professor of Neolithic Archaeology at Cardiff University and co-author, with Colin Richards, of last year’s Stone Circles: A Field Guide. ‘It’s a sense of awe and wonder. We write in terms of the Neolithic way that people saw these things, but it’s the same today. Wander around Avebury; it’s massive. And people did all of that by hand! Rollers and ropes, digging with antler picks… You can’t tell me that isn’t incredible.’

Ancient sites have been delighting academics for centuries, from antiquarians such as John Aubrey, William Stukeley and William Borlase in the 17th and 18th centuries to 20th-century writers such as Jacquetta Hawkes and Aubrey Burl, whose 1995 A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany remains the definitive primer on the topic, suffused with archaeological instruction and detail. However, it feels as if their appeal is growing ever wider. A sea change came with The Modern Antiquarian in 1998. Written by post-punk singer and self-defined ‘Arch Drude’ Julian Cope, it’s a dense gazetteer of the ancient world; wilfully poetic in its melding of pagan mysticism and bravura rock-’n’-roll posturing. It’s close to a sacred text, a cult classic despite being long out of print.

Zip forward 20 years and you can now see a raft of chic, artsy independent publications channelling its approach, such as Hellebore, Wandering Wizard and, particularly, Weird Walk: a ‘journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles’ that was founded in 2019 by James Nicholls, Owen Tromans and Alex Hornsby. The beautifully designed magazine, with its neo-pagan aesthetic, has covered a gamut of stone-adjacent topics, from beginners’ guides to dolmens to the prevalence of pagan hijinks in Inspector Morse. However, things were really galvanised with the release of a Weird Walk book in 2023, a fine compendium of ancient sites and regional folk rituals arranged by the seasons.

Operating in parallel is Stone Club, which was opened in 2021 by Cornwall-based artists Lally MacBeth and Matthew Shaw. Emerging from post-lockdown ennui, it was ‘set up as a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate, to muse and most importantly to stomp to stones’. For a bargain £7, initiates receive both a member’s card and badge: ‘Very much in the style of the Dennis the Menace fan club,’ laughs MacBeth. Today, the club has 4,000 members, from as far afield as America, Germany and Australia (which has a large diasporic Cornish community from its mining heyday, she explains). They run evenings of talks, recommend monthly books, albums and films, and encourage users to contribute their own written and photographic accounts of personal stone quests. They have even received old photographs of members’ grandparents at ancient sites, together with requests to identify the particular rocks — a kind of neolithic detective agency.

The reconstituting of these sites back into zones of communal and generational significance is, in a way, as close to their original purposes as they have been in since inception (the activities of the UK’s extant pagan communities notwithstanding; there were 74,000 of them in the most recent UK census). Stone Club came along at a time of social schism: mid-covid, post-Brexit, amid geopolitical tumult. The stones, explains Shaw, ‘provided a neutral space for people to be able to engage and talk with one thing in common’. This idea of these places being both a hotline to our ancestors and a palimpsest for modern ritual might be the crux of the ancient renaissance.

‘They don’t have values of their own; they’re simply there,’ he continues. ‘I think that’s really attractive, because you can project onto them — but, ultimately, they’ll take as many projections as there are people.’ It’s a notion shared by British photographer Alice Zoo. In 2022, she was commissioned by National Geographic to visit Stonehenge for a six-month project, documenting the people interacting with the site: from New Age Travellers and practising druids to activists, conservators and even new parents placing their babies’ bare feet on the ground, looking to forge a connection with a place buzzing with energy.

‘There’s something very reassuring about the solid fact of stones and their place in Nature,’ she explains. ‘It has nothing to do with screens or algorithms. It’s timeless, physical, there’s humanity in it — and so much mystery.’

'Ancient Britain for Modern Folk’ by Tom Howells is out now (Hoxton Mini Press, £14.95)

This feature originally appeared in the June 25, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

If it weren’t for the moles, this would be paradise. By not trapping and killing them during the winter months, I had hoped some sort of divine intervention would see respite once the mowing season started. Thus, my nearest view from my study window is of little brown hillocks popping up to obscure my neat lawn lines and I need to nudge myself to look beyond, over the hedge and up to Willett Hill.

It’s a steep slope of verdant green pasture with a smattering of sheep before you reach the treeline and I know that in there, deep in that wood, is an ancient tower. It now houses bats, but once was a refuge for soldiers during the Second World War on lookout for German bombers heading up the Bristol Channel to do their worst over our towns and cities.

Thus Willett Tower fixes this spot in the landscape, one that is relatively new to me. The Brendon Hills of west Somerset is where we have a small, old farm, from the top of which you can see across to Wales to the north, to the Quantocks to the west and the Black-downs to the south. To the west is Exmoor, where it gets wilder — as a local told me, five years back in time for every mile. There are remote pubs up there, cash only with one ale on tap. It makes where we are, on the border of the Exmoor National Park, feel relatively modern, albeit more with a feel of the 1970s of growing up in Oxfordshire, such is the spirit of community here. It still — just — feels a little untouched by the rest of the country.

Our local town of Wiveliscombe exemplifies that. Apart from the glorious, eccentrically English poetry of the name, it has what every great town once had: a proper pub (now with its own micro-brewery), The Bear, a chic little hotel and restaurant, The White Hart, a great café, Phoenix Kitchen, a wonderful butcher, Thorne’s, a deli, a hardware store, two breweries and a gun room. Meat, ale and guns — what else do you need, bar glorious scenery? It is also extremely friendly, surprisingly so when you, as a newcomer, quickly realise that people who have been here for 25 years are regarded as newbies.

We are not blessed by great restaurants, but I worked a way around that. I popped a line of tables and chairs in our cowshed, bought some steel tables, a large fridge and a fire pit and asked well-known chefs to come and cook. Now, Sitwell Supper Club is on Google Maps and we entertain 75 merry folk each month: a chance to eat the smart food of the metropolis without troubling the usually delayed GWR service from Taunton to Paddington.

Local highlight
When it’s not raining, the air is so fresh it makes you sleepy and the night sky shows the stars as clearly as I once saw in the middle of Africa.

Local lowlight
The light-polluting haze edging over in the east, which blights the dark skies. This would be Hinkley Point C. Still, the 10,000 workers at the nuclear-power plant are at least on the other side of the Quantocks. It makes the construction efforts of the deviant mole distinctly charming.

William Sitwell is a writer and a restaurant critic for ‘The Daily Telegraph’. He runs the Sitwell Supper Club at Rooks Nest Farm, Somerset

Most tourists speed through Northumberland heading for Scotland — big mistake, but long may they do so. Northumberland has all the ingredients of perfection: long views and big skies; spectacular sandy beaches, bird-thronged islands and salmon-stuffed rivers; wild mountains and moors; Arcadian gardens, parks and forests; castles galore, Roman remains, medieval battlefields and Christian shrines; a rich industrial heritage; picturesque market towns and a great city (Newcastle, now excised from its boundaries, alas). Other counties may have better examples of each, but none has them all.

Stand on the island of Inner Farne, surrounded by thousands of puffins and Arctic terns, and look west: the skyline is dominated by the 400-million-year-old extinct stratovolcano of The Cheviot, on the summit of which breed golden plover and dunlin. The border ballads tell of reiver feuds and battles in these hills that simmered down a few short centuries ago. In the foreground, on an outcrop of the Whin Sill, an igneous intrusion of 300 million years ago, stands Bamburgh Castle, capital of a Dark-Age kingdom that kept literacy alive for Europe. It was remodelled by a 19th-century battleship engineer, Lord Armstrong.

To the north, with its little Lutyens castle on another whinstone outcrop, is the tidal isle of Holy Island (Lindisfarne), where St Aidan and St Cuthbert converted pagans before the first Viking raid pillaged their abbey.

On a clear day, to the south, on yet another whinstone outcrop, you can see the gaunt remains of John of Gaunt’s great castle of Dunstanburgh, a reminder of how the Wars of the Roses up here were a family feud between Percys and Nevilles.

Travel south-west, inland, through the open, rolling, tree-spotted country where Capability Brown was born at Kirkharle (see where he got his inspiration), and you find the Whin Sill again, parallel with the river South Tyne. The crags are topped with a ribbon of stone, built on the Trumpian orders of the Emperor Hadrian, in a largely futile attempt to keep the Picts at bay.

Northumberland’s wildness has long been enhanced by manmade additions. The Whin Sill would be dull without the Roman wall, Bamburgh beach is all the better for its castle backdrop. This enhancement continues today. The Woodhorn museum of mining tells of a time when the Tyne supplied almost half the world with its energy.

The landform sculpture of Northumberlandia, the Lady of the North (which I helped commission), marks the end of coal. Vindolanda museum has more Roman shoes than the rest of the empire put together. The new Ad Gefrin distillery and visitor centre in Wooler tells the story of 7th-century King Edwin and his conversion by Paulinus.

Local lowlight
Central government’s vandalism: the view from Inner Farne is scarred by costly, futile and bird-killing wind turbines. Inland, the once fine valley of the North Tyne is now Europe’s largest manmade forest: Kielder, a dark sea of unprofitable, nationalised, alien sitka spruce where the cry of the curlew is no longer heard.

Favourite view
From the Farnes off the coast to a line of Inner Farne, Bamburgh Castle and The Cheviot.

Matt Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, is a businessman, science writer and the author of ‘Birds, Sex & Beauty’ (Fourth Estate)

This summer, we celebrate 700 years living alongside the glorious Exe Estuary in Devon — there is no place like home! In 1325, Margaret de Bohun married Hugh de Courtenay, Earl of Devon; her dowry was the Manor of Powderham. Their fifth son, Sir Philip, built the castle and established a cadet branch of the family that has called Powderham home ever since.

Powderham means ‘village on a marsh’ and the low-lying landscape and our relationship to it is defined by the tides and the seasons, a blend of human and natural history. Phoenicians traded up the Exe’s tidal inlets before the Romans arrived, naming the river and the city ‘Isca’ for the abundance of fish. Until only recently, the Exe was synonymous with food and trade.

The weir at Countess Wear powered the family’s mills and ensured ships docked at Topsham, the family port. Trade grew, making the Exe England’s second busiest port, importing wine and radicalism in return for serge cloth and pilgrims. Once Henry VIII had beheaded the Earl of Devon, his cousin, Exeter, regained its link to the sea with Exeter canal, the first in England, built in 1542.

Further down the west bank stands the ancient church of St Clement, patron saint of seafarers, on Powderham Point, the family mausoleum. It was also the site of the Civil War Battle of Powderham. During the 1600s local fishermen crossed the Atlantic to harvest the cod-banks of Newfoundland, preserving their catch in salt from Powderham’s salt pans, traces of which are still visible in the marshes that were later drained to create rich pasture, making the Exe famous for its spring lamb. Wildfowl were harvested off the foreshore and decoy; the Exe now boasts SSSI and Ramsar protections for overwintering birds.

The lower Exe is filled with boats on moorings, in a long leisure-sailing tradition. The family began hosting fêtes-marine (regattas) and founded the Starcross Yacht Club in 1772, the oldest sailing club on record and now housed in the Powderham family’s boat house. The rise of leisure led to the designed landscape of the Powderham deer park, with its herd of fallow deer and veteran trees. The Gothic Belvedere tower has the finest views up to Exeter and out to sea. Exotic trees line the estuary banks, imported from across the globe by the nurserymen Veitch, Luccombe and Co.

In the 1840s came modernity in the form of Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway, bringing folks from the Midlands to holiday in Dawlish and on the English Riviera. It now carries fast GWR trains that break the stillness of the estuary. On Dawlish Warren, holidaymakers abound, alongside the old links golf course and a sanctuary for wading birds. The Exe is as it has always been, a crucible of activity between humans and Nature.

Favourite place for a pint
The Turf locks, at the mouth of the canal, only reachable by bike or on foot along the Exe Cycle Path.

Local delicacy
Curried cockles, historically picked by the ladies of Starcross, who shocked travel writer Fannie Bernie by showing off their ankles.


Charles Courtenay, the 19th Earl of Devon, is a barrister and owner of the Powderham estate, Devon — www.powderham.co.uk

What goes around, they say, comes around. And what goes around on rails, rather slowly, with a stately sway and a soothing clickety-clack, has come around once more with a vengeance. The resurgence of high-end train travel isn’t difficult to understand. It’s a joyful throwback to a mode of travel grown so unfamiliar as to have become novel once more — so old-fashioned, it’s new-fashioned. We love the glossy look and velvety feel of it. We appreciate the notion that it’s a more environmentally responsible means of seeing the world. And in terms of the way it throws complete strangers together at close quarters, against ever-changing and generally highly picturesque landscapes, no other form of transportation can begin to compete with it.

So when I was invited recently to join a two-night trip around the Highlands on Belmond’s Royal Scotsman to celebrate the train’s 40th anniversary, I was there like a shot.

This particular trip was a little out of the ordinary. Rather than a random assortment of paying passengers, the train was packed with specially selected influencers, tastemakers and celebrities. For better or worse, I didn’t have a clue who any of these influential, tasteful and celebrated people were. Let them eat cake, I thought. Let us all eat cake. (And we did.)

The Royal Scotsman has evolved considerably over the past four decades. Belmond (which also runs the Venice-Simplon Orient-Express, the Andean Explorer, the Eastern & Oriental Express, the British Pullman and the brand-new Britannic Explorer) continues to innovate, not only in terms of the Royal Scotsman’s routes and itineraries (there are currently 15 of them), but also themes and activities (food and drink, wellness, estates and gardens, castles and islands) and on-board indulgences (notably the luscious little Dior Spa and the addition this summer of two jumbo-sized Grand Suites).

Ours was a slightly tweaked version of the two-night Taste of Scotland itinerary: a leisurely loop from Edinburgh up through the Cairngorms to Boat of Garten, on to Keith, then back down to Edinburgh via Dundee. My favourite moments, as with every trip I’ve had the good fortune to take on a Belmond train, tended to be quiet ones. Which is definitely not to say I’ve got anything whatsoever against the sound of champagne corks popping, whisky glasses clinking, raucous laughter over lavish dinners, the fiddling and stomping of ceilidh musicians or even (as on this trip) phat beats mixed by an alarmingly glamorous Danish DJ, Fiona Jane. But something about fancy train travel brings out the low-key, lo-fi loafer in me. After dinner on the first night, for instance, we piled off the train in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere to be entertained by a troupe of highly energised Celts who, duded up in furry-leathery Mad Max-meets-The Flintstones outfits, thumped gigantic drums and hurled balls of fire at one another. Impressive as these antics were, they were, to my eye, no match for the sight of the train itself, silent and still, waiting at a discreet distance for us to return, its golden lights glowing in the greater darkness.

Another low-key highlight came the following day at the Rothiemurchus Estate when I went forest bathing with a softly spoken American yoga instructor named Katie White. An experience I’d recommend to anyone. This blissful, sun-dappled interlude on sheepskin rugs beneath swaying boughs was followed by a ‘survival skills’ session with Zeki Basan, a noted, locally based outdoorsman. Basan’s bushcraft tips and ruminations on the interconnectedness of natural systems were a huge and slightly unexpected hit with our cashmere-swaddled, Hunter-wellied crowd. Basan is a strapping, thoughtful lad with a knowing twinkle in his eye and precisely the right kind of patter. He had the cool London kids in the palm of his calloused hand, oohing and aahing as he extolled the virtues of tanning one’s own leather from salmon skins.

Our survival skills sharpened and senses heightened, we fearlessly yet mindfully trekked the 50 metres or so back to the lodge where we were treated to an exceptional lunch of Middle Eastern-influenced dishes prepared by Basan’s mother, Ghillie Basan, who wrote the book (actually, dozens of them) on Middle Eastern-influenced dishes for a British readership long before Yotam Ottolenghi arrived on the scene.

The days were unseasonably warm, sunny, cloudless and altogether un-Scottish. I spent a lot of time gazing idly out of the windows of the Observation Car, listening to the gentle slap of low-hanging leaves against the side of the train and remembering previous trips on the Royal Scotsman. As we passed through Keith I recalled, with a nostalgic pang, the magnificent Strathisla distillery there, surely one of the prettiest distilleries in the land, producing one of my favourite malts, and the superb Chivas Brothers-owned hotel, Linn House, nearby. My pang was, however, effectively dealt with by the Royal Scotsman’s crack bar team, who quickly located a bottle of Strathisla 12-year-old.

Another place I visited on an earlier Royal Scotsman trip that we passed by, but didn’t stop at this time, was Ballindalloch Castle, where the first Aberdeen Angus cows were bred. The current laird’s parents, Clare Macpherson-Grant and Oliver Russell, showed us around on that occasion. The castle has been in the Macpherson-Grant family for goodness knows how long. ‘Oliver had never set foot in Scotland before he met me,’ Clare said. ‘When he got me, he got the castle and the cows too.’ Oliver, who might have been a model for one of the more benign characters in an early Evelyn Waugh novel, seemed happy with the outcome. While we were in the garden he gestured at some cows grazing in the distance. ‘Admission to the castle is free,’ he quipped. ‘But the bull may charge later! Haw haw haw!’

The combination of comfort, conviviality and lovely landscapes that you get with the Royal Scotsman is unique. True, all of Belmond’s trains offer comfort, conviviality and lovely landscapes. But only one of those trains operates in Scotland, and Scotland is special. A trip on the Royal Scotsman remains one of the great train journeys of the world. Here’s to the next 40 years.

Journeys on Royal Scotsman, A Belmond Train start from £4,800 per person (for the Taste of Highlands itinerary). The price includes all meals, unlimited soft drinks and excursions as per the itinerary

High on the Malvern Hills, you have two views. To the east lies Worcestershire’s fertile plain; to the west a vista more lumpy and wooded, a misty land of gurgling brooks, gnarled hedgerows and, as C. S. Lewis imagined, gambolling fauns. This is Herefordshire. In spring, its orchards drip with blossom. Orchids dance on spinney floors, hop poles line the lanes and the cows’ brown-dappled hides match the rich soil. Locals call it ‘the shire’, others consider it paradise; to me, it has been home this past quarter of a century.

Did that view inspire Lewis’s Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth? Both men often walked the Malverns. It is hard to believe flat Worcestershire could have fuelled much magic, but that bucolic kingdom to the west, its valleys and hummocks fluffed by old man’s beard, knolls with Arthurian dolmens, a louring hog’s back on the Welsh horizon? Now you’re talking.

The dimpled Herefordshire Beacon, or British Camp, is said to have given Tolkien his White Mountains of Gondor. I spent schoolboy years in its lee, thrilling to the yarn that this was where Caratacus fought the Romans. Another candidate for that event is Caradoc, a bluff near Ross on Wye. Legends swirl around Herefordshire — the cider can do that to you. The Woolhope Dome, also near Ross, is allegedly the best place in the world to grow apples.

Ross was the birthplace of British tourism; 18th-century travellers thought Symonds Yat a match for any Rhine gorge. Our other towns are Leominster, its quieter sister Bromyard, Kington in the wild west and pretty Ledbury, where a poetry festival starts on June 27. Four years ago, a Titian was found at Ledbury church: it had been there for ages, rather grubby, and no one had noticed its provenance.

Hereford’s pink-sandstone, low-slung cathedral houses the 14th-century Mappa Mundi — look at its headless blemmyes and winged salamanders and tell me its maker hadn’t been at the Westons vintage cider (8.2%) from Much Marcle.

In the summer of 2025 Hereford cathedral will play host to the Three Choirs Festival (July 26-August 2), established by 1715. A statue of Edward Elgar with his bicycle watches from a corner of the close. If you hear the roar of a motorbike, that’ll be our bishop, Richard Jackson, on his Harley-Davidson. The expression ‘Right Revd’ acquires new meaning.

The county’s 200 medieval churches include Shobdon, with its wedding-cake interior, and Moccas (about 1130), where the organ is water-powered. Box-pewed, 12th-century Clodock was named after a murdered Welsh king, Clydawg. These contested Marches were battle lands for centuries and are dotted with ruined castles. Recent digs at Snodhill Castle, Dorstone, suggest it was the love-nest of Elizabeth I (so much for the ‘virgin queen’). Yet who could blame the most virtuous soul for falling in love with, and in, this lush, romantic Eden?

Local highlight
The bucolic countryside.

Local lowlight
Lack of a bypass for Hereford.

Best-kept secret
Tom Denny’s Traherne stained-glass windows (2007) in the Audley Chapel of Hereford Cathedral.

Quentin Letts is a parliamentary sketch writer, theatre critic and author. His latest book is ‘NUNC!’ (Constable)

Nothing can match the Itchen Valley. No Yorkshire dale, no Scottish moor, no view from Westminster Bridge is fairer. People tell me that there is another chalkstream in Hampshire called the Test. They say it is quite good for fishing, too, yet it cannot compare with the dreamy English beauty of the Itchen and its valley.

Our river rises near Kilmeston, a few hundred yards from the National Trust’s elegant garden at Hinton Ampner. A spring gushes out of the chalk hillside, just above a grassy meadow where more water oozes up in half a dozen places. All these rivulets come together so quickly that, by the time it has run for 100 yards, it is already a respectable size — a real river, rather than a stream. Soon, it picks up chalk-downland tributaries and continues its progress past the delightful market town of Alresford.

The leafy middle reach of the river runs west to Winchester. This is the heart of the Itchen valley, where fishermen can be sure of finding wild trout for their flies.

It is an ancient landscape: archaeologists tell us a Roman aqueduct once ran through our garden. The name of the river, however, is older than recorded history — not Anglo-Saxon, not Roman, not Celtic, but Iron-Age Britonnic. Cast your fly over the glittering water, then reflect that our most distant ancestors used nets and arrows for their catch.

Ponder the names of villages through which the river passes — Titchfield, Itchen Stoke and Martyr Worthy — and reflect that each is a settlement sanctified by a millennium of Christian worship in its unostentatious parish church. At Winchester, the valley turns south, past the best school in England — I had tutorials in the house in College Street where Jane Austen once lived (‘A room with a view’, June 4) — and the river pursues its course through innumerable channels, leats and runnels. As a teenager, I saw salmon spawning here in January — their first return to the Itchen, I was told, for more than 100 years. The final stretch of the river towards its estuary near Southampton is broad and stately. Indeed, Winchester was once accessible to shallow river boats from the Solent. Some people still fish this part and brag about its kingfishers.

What not to miss in the Itchen Valley

Highlights and lowlights
We have Britain’s most sparkling landscape, rich in history and glorious in its variety. Has the Itchen Valley any defects? Sometimes we think there are perhaps too many tourists in Winchester, but we do understand why they find King Alfred’s capital so attractive (‘City of legend’, June 4) and we appreciate their good taste in choosing to visit us.


Underrated
John Keats wrote his ode To Autumn (‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’) on a walk along the river, past the College towards the Hospital of St Cross and Alms-house of Noble Poverty where, to this very day, the traveller may receive the Wayfarer’s Dole — a horn of ale and a hunk of bread first offered by kind Cluniac monks, centuries before the Protestant Reformation.


Charles Quest-Ritson is a Country Life columnist, a leading rosarian and author of ‘The Olive Tree: Around the World’ (Ediciones El Viso)

There is a moment, as the sun begins to slip below the ridgeline, when the Vale of Belvoir becomes something truly magical. The warm light casts long shadows across the folds of pasture and ancient hedgerows. The castle rises above it all like a sentinel of time, watching over a landscape that has changed remarkably little for centuries. It is a moment that still stops me in my tracks — and one that reminds me why I will always call this pocket of England home.

The Vale of Belvoir is not a place of grand gestures or attention-seeking landscapes. It is gentle, quietly poetic and layered with history. You don’t need to look far to find Roman roads, medieval field systems or Jacobean farmsteads. However, it is the land itself that steals your heart — soft, rolling hills that seem to breathe with the seasons; golden fields that stretch like a patchwork quilt across the horizon.

There is something immensely grounding about the rhythm of life here — the quiet surrounding Vale villages, the Sunday church bells, the familiar faces. The smallness of life in the Vale is its greatest luxury — a reminder that beauty often lies in the details, not the drama.

Belvoir Castle, of course, is a crown jewel of the surrounding area. A fairy-tale silhouette perched above the Vale, it has stood for 1,000 years — witness to wars, weddings, harvests and homecomings.

What I love most is not the grandeur of its turrets, but the intimacy of its connection to the land. From the castle grounds, on a clear day, you can see three counties stretch out in every direction. The wind seems to carry the stories of the past across the fields. Just below, our little Engine Yard hums with new life — a collection of local shops and eateries, filled with heart and hustle. If you know, you know: the pizzas there are some of the best in the country, but still delightfully under the radar.

Soon, the much-loved The Manners Arms in Knipton will reopen — my favourite pub and a place that always felt like an extension of home. There’s nothing quite like a pint in the garden there on a long June evening, with the castle silhouetted behind the trees. To me, Belvoir is not only beautiful — it’s alive. It breathes with the stories of the people who have shaped it and welcomes those who come seeking something slower, richer and rooted.

Lady Violet Manners on what not to miss in the Vale of Belvoir

Local highlight
The Manners Arms in Knipton (reopening this summer)

Local lowlight
Lack of public transport — there is no direct bus to Belvoir (although it keeps things peaceful)

Underrated
The view from the castle at dusk — and the Engine Yard pizzas

Lady Violet Manners is the host of the ‘Hidden Heritage’ podcast and founder of the heritage travel platform HeritageXplore, covering 50 independent historic houses

'I’m not the type who wants to go back to the land,' Fran Lebowitz once quipped. 'I’m the type who wants to go back to the hotel.' Next time that most steadfastly metropolitan of essayists makes the trip from Manhattan to Midlothian, she might try spending a couple of nights at Penicuik Estate, which occupies some 7,500 acres half an hour or so south of Edinburgh at the foot of the Pentland Hills, where it’s possible to go back to the land and back to the hotel more or less simultaneously, and where both options are equally attractive.

The background is interesting. In the first half of the 17th century an ambitious and versatile young merchant from Montrose named John Clerk accrued a modest fortune importing silk stockings, medieval manuscripts and mousetraps from France, along with what may have been the first Rembrandt to come to Scotland. Eventually, flush with success, he resolved to 'give over all Trade, and become a Country Gentleman'. To which end he purchased the land and barony of Penicuik in 1654. (The name is pronounced 'Pennycook' and derives from a Celtic phrase meaning 'place of the cuckoo'.)

The estate has remained in the family ever since. Each successive generation has left its imprint. Two individuals, however, Sir John Clerk (1676-1755) and his son Sir James Clerk (1709-1782), second and third baronets respectively, were especially influential.

Sir John was something of a phenomenon, a judge, politician, Grand Tourist, antiquarian, amateur architect and landscape gardener credited with introducing the Palladian style to Scotland. In between dashing off ditties such as 'Oh Merry May the Maid Be that Marries the Miller' and a six-volume treatise (in Latin) on the necessity of the Union of Great Britain, he found time to create the Designed Landscape of Penicuik, now officially recognised as being of 'outstanding value as a work of art'.

In certain respects a chip off the old block, Sir James enhanced the estate’s claim to distinction, notably by overseeing the construction of Penicuik House, among the earliest and finest Palladian buildings in Scotland, between 1761 and 1769.

Penicuik House was ruined by fire in 1899. The Clerks were obliged to decamp 100 yards or so to the stable block — a distinctly superior kind of stable block, mind you, with its immaculate Cambridge-college-like courtyard, soaring clocktower and vast domed dovecote.

The charred shell of 'Old' Penicuik House still stands and is open to the public, free of charge. Each year some 150,000 visitors come to enjoy Sir John’s Designed Landscape and Sir James’s atmospheric ruin. Yet natural and architectural beauties are not enough in themselves to keep the lights on, and nor, these days, is farming.

Enter Ed Clerk, Penicuik’s current custodian, youngest son of the 11th baronet and a man on a mission to restore and regenerate the estate. Spend even a few minutes in his amiable company and his commitment to the land, the family, the community and the environment shines through. 'I was always the one with lots of annoying ideas,' he says modestly. Though still very much a working farm, and with great potential in terms of its natural capital, Clerk sees hospitality and leisure as integral elements of the business model going forwards.

Five of the estate’s cottages and lodges have been restored and made available to rent since summer 2024, with six more to come in the year ahead. Meanwhile, Penicuik House itself (above) — the former stable block — has undergone a complete renovation and reinvention as a 16-bed exclusive-use hotel. Though not quite finished at the time of my most recent visit, it was shaping up gorgeously, its interiors similar in style to the already renovated cottages — cosy country-chic, faintly Soho Farmhouse-ish — just dialled up a bit to a still higher pitch of opulence.

Collectors and connoisseurs from the get-go, the Clerks quickly accumulated quite the inventory of objets and accoutrements. Few of their portable possessions were lost in the fire of 1899, which, though it left the old house a wreck, burned so slowly that almost everything that could be removed by hand was removed, including not only paintings, carpets and tapestries but also panelling, architraves and entire fireplaces. Expect to see many of these in the revamped Penicuik House, alongside, in some of the downstairs rooms, the old iron rings to which horses were once tethered.

Enjoying Penicuik isn’t difficult, even if you don’t have any particular knowledge of its extraordinary history. But the enjoyment is enhanced if you do. The estate and the family that own it have played a vital role in life of the area, indeed, at times, of the nation, over several centuries. That they have managed to hang on to Penicuik through thick and thin is remarkable enough; that they’re now, under Ed Clerk’s stewardship, pursuing such an admirably thoughtful, holistic approach to securing its future is all the more so.

By all means do go back to the land, on your way back to the hotel.

A one-bedroom cottage costs from £220 a night; Penicuik House (sleeps 32) is taking bookings from August 2025

To take a walk around Malmesbury is to be almost overwhelmed by Englishness. A labyrinth of honey-coloured stone, where the wisteria grows and blooms just so. Charity shops and the passing elderly. History around every corner, interspersed by babbling brooks and lush green fields. Streets of indistinguishable sizes and directions. An abbey. Aethelstan. All that is missing is a Spitfire spinning in the sky.

It’s almost too much, this arcadia. A film-set passing off as real life. But there is no doubt that it is perhaps one of the country’s most beautiful towns, because it is so perfectly English. Is it any surprise, then, that it is also home to England’s oldest hotel? Where else would it be?

The hotel in question is The Old Bell, and it was opened as a hostelry by Abbott Loring in 1220. Now it is owned and managed by a couple from Dripping Springs, Texas, called Kim and Whit Hanks. Hang on a minute. Texas? The place with the cowboys? England’s oldest hotel is owned and run by a couple from Texas? Yes, and thank goodness too.

It is far from the easiest thing in the world to take a hotel, especially a hotel like the Old Bell, and keep it both relevant to its place (Malmesbury) and exotic. I would argue that it is perhaps the most difficult balancing act in hospitality. But the rewards are great, if executed correctly, and what Kim and White have achieved at the Old Bell is nothing short of sensational.

I would not even want to imagine how difficult it might be to re-design and redecorate a building from the 13th century; a building that is likely so listed that even looking at it funny will land you in prison. Breathing new life into a building that has already seen so much is a task only to be undertaken by those with exceptional taste, something that the English would not normally associate with the Lone Star State.

And yet, to walk through the halls and rooms of the Old Bell is to see the very best of design. It is a space where English curiosity and eccentricity has been brought to the fore, with just the right amount of New World razzle dazzle to make things pop. A faux giraffe head here, a Tyger bar there, and in between, William Morris-esque wallpapers, wicker chairs, brass and wood.

The aesthetic is so important because it is so fun, without being in any way tacky. It makes the Old Bell a place worth visiting, rather than just another honey-coloured piece of furniture in the traditional tapestry of the Cotswolds. And as much as Malmesbury is ‘England’, so too is that sense of fun, of bright wallpaper and curios, of joy steeped in tradition. We just need to be reminded that it's there.

You can say lots of things about the Americans, and not all of them are kind. But what they do better than anything else is hospitality and fun. The Old Bell could have been, perhaps should have been, just like any other small luxury hotel in this most perfect part of England. But it isn’t, because a fresh eye and a splash of joy is just what it needed to be even better.

The Rooms

There is always a danger in a hotel that is more than 800 years old that a man of 194cms in height is going to struggle. Somehow not so. The rooms are wildly spacious and the ceilings high. Kim’s outstanding taste is prevalent, creating rooms of sincere character that make the most of their unusual shapes. But comfort is first and foremost — the beds are serene and there are plenty of plugs of all shapes and sizes. The bathrooms are also very elegant — think big baths, brass taps, rainfall showers.

The Food

If the eccentric charm of the Old Bell isn’t enough to tempt you to visit, then come at least for the food. At Abbey Row, the in-house restaurant, Daniel Kerr combines local and seasonal ingredients to create a menu of traditional English fare that’s cooked to perfection. There is plenty to enjoy a la carte, but the real show is in the set tasting menu, where seven courses allow him to really show off. Much like the rest of the hotel, it’s all very English, with a splash of American flair. Great cocktails and a terrific wine list are a given.

The Old Bell also offers a sensational afternoon tea offering and, while I didn’t have time to try it, it seems that people travelled from far and wide to have a go. The presentation looked top notch.

What to do while you’re there

Where to start. The Cotswolds is a rich tapestry of history, culture and activities. In the hotel itself, why not try the cocktail making class. As well as learning three of the hotel’s signature drinks, you’ll also be nicely lubricated for the rest of the evening.

In Malmesbury itself, there is lots of walking to be done, and the hotel offers a helpful map which not only tells you where to go, but what to look at and some helpful historical insight. There are also a lot of very good charity shops in the town, so bargain-hunting is a must.

Further afield, Lake 32 offers paddleboarding and other watersports, Westonbirt Arboretum is a short drive away, as is The King’s home at Highgrove.

The Cornish coastline stretches for 422 miles, reaches heights of 732ft (at High Cliff, above Rusey Beach) and includes more than 300 beaches. The statistics tell just a tiny part of the tale, though, as Ben Lerwill writes in the May 21 issue of Country Life. 'This is a serpentine land-meets-seascape of ancient inlets and tumbling waves, of rearing cliffs and sun-caught spindrift, of smugglers’ caverns and soft sands, of winds that roar off the ocean and headlands that stand immutable,' writes Ben. 'Cornwall is a promontory that invites awe.'

Ben has picked out some of his favourites, which we'll be sharing on the Country Life website over the next couple of weeks — and we're starting with Kynance Cove.

Kynance Cove

Of all these places, Kynance Cove is likely to need the least introduction. As the scenic highlight of the Lizard Peninsula — which really is saying something — it serves up a preposterously grand spread of pinnacles, cliffs, caves, sands and rugged sea stacks. In sunshine, with the white beach offset by the turquoise wash of the shallows, it’s like something from a fantasy.

Deservedly popular, the cove is managed by the National Trust and draws big crowds over the peak summer season.

The sagest advice is not only to time your visit with low tide, when the sands are at their most impressive, but to avoid the busiest tourist months if possible.

A hulking tidal outcrop, the cove’s centrepiece, is Asparagus Island, so-called because of the native wild asparagus that grows there. The interconnected caves that appear at low tide were named by Victorian visitors, resulting in the likes of The Parlour, The Drawing Room and The Ladies Bathing Pool.

Visiting Kynance Cove

The cove is on the west side of the Lizard, just around from Lizard Point itself (which is 2.5 miles via the coastal path).

It's managed by the National Trust — see nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/cornwall/kynance-cove — with the car park (£2-£10, or free for members).

My happiest childhood memories are of trespassing and poaching. At school, I kept a fishing rod in my locker and, whenever the opportunity arose, I would disappear off to cast a worm for a salmon. During the holidays, I’d be out with my terrier trying to catch rabbits.

I have long been aware that being able to explore the countryside is essential for our wellbeing. In some ways, it’s part of British identity. This was my inspiration for writing Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our relationship with the countryside. From fox-hunting to fell running, this is our green and pleasant land—but what impact does footfall have on the countryside and, therefore, on farming and conservation? As a species, humans are flourishing, whereas birds such as the curlew are fast crying their way towards extinction. Their decline is a consequence of our success.

On a bright January day in 2023, the largest land-access demonstration since the 1930s was held on Dartmoor, with some 3,000 people protesting against wild camping being officially banned on the moor (many landowners have long tacitly allowed it) after legal action brought by landowner Alexander Darwall. His contention was that people, en masse, are harmful to wildlife and cause trouble for farmers. The Right to Roam campaign, by contrast, wants to camp without permission. ‘The stars are for everyone’, the campaign slogan runs.

That march — and I was there — was triggered by the camping ban, but it was about more than that. The Right to Roam campaign complains that the public can only access 8% of the countryside and there is a narrative that large estates are no-go zones. With reference to the Englefield estate in Berkshire, for instance, Right to Roam organisers claim that ‘but for a few stunted footpaths that trace along some field margins, the rivers, lakes, woodland, and meadows of [Richard, Baron Benyon’s] vast domain remain shut, at all times’.

This is compelling, yet categorically false: 1,700 acres of Englefield are accessible and I had an amusing day there talking to visitors, one from Ghana, another from Tennessee in the US. They were amazed at how good the access is in England. ‘If there was anything like this in Ghana,’ said the former, ‘it would be private and we wouldn’t be able to access it.’

The 8% figure is important to contextualise. It refers to the extent of designated ‘access land’ as defined in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, which includes moorland and registered ‘common land’. It isn’t, as is often claimed, the entirety of accessible land in England. Take Holkham estate in Norfolk, where roughly 20% of the 25,000 acres can be enjoyed, including 3,000 acres of parkland. Clearly, this is a lot of space, but it wouldn’t fall within that 8%. As so often, the truth behind the rabble-rousing statistics isn’t what the rabble-rousers would have you believe.

Part of the inspiration for my book was to talk to those affected by access, from whom we don’t often hear — such as farmers, conservationists and gamekeepers. I was shocked to learn from Cameron Farquharson, a farmer in Dorset whose grazing land is open to the public, that he often loses 10% of his sheep to wayward dogs in a year. His worst-ever day was when 11 pregnant ewes were killed. Impressively, Mr Farquharson has responded by providing farm tours — he believes that the best line of defence is education.

Livestock worrying is the most obvious impact on agriculture, although there is much more at play. Pig farmers, for example, worry about biosecurity. If a discarded ham sandwich contaminated with African swine fever ends up being eaten by pigs, it could result in the disease tearing through Britain’s pig population, which would mean the sector locking down. Unable to sell their animals, pig-farming businesses — which are often marginal — would go bang.

Ed Barker, head of policy at the Agricultural Industries Confederation, explains that part of the issue is modern living. In an increasingly globalised world, people bring all sorts of ‘zoonotic nasties’ back with them from holidays abroad. He also fears that the rise of the staycation has the potential to be problematic. Staying at a farm B&B with a bovine TB problem in Devon one weekend and then hiking in the Lakes the next could be a disaster. Contamination on your boots could literally ruin a farm business.

As well as posing a problem for farmers, access can be an issue for conservation. One curious thing about humans is the determination to venture into the habitats of other creatures. Seals seldom flop onto our sofas, but we feel it’s our right to enjoy their coastal homes. At the seal hospital in Hunstanton, Norfolk, I met pups that had been abandoned by their mothers because of human disturbance. Sophie Negus, the hospital’s curator, even recounted a recent incident in which a man put his toddler on a seal’s back, as if they were riding it, for a photograph.

We are sometimes told the public doesn’t appreciate wildlife because they don’t get to see it. Yet we can see seals and that suggestion didn’t land particularly well with a Pennines gamekeeper who continually has his black grouse disturbed by birdwatchers.

There is a fundamental point that must be considered and that is that, in the year 1500, the population of Britain was 2.5 million. It’s now 30 times that and rising — it simply wouldn’t work to have unfettered access to the countryside. Campaigners in England often point to Scotland as an example of how brilliantly Right to Roam works. Yet the powers that be have had to impose no-camping zones in the Central Belt and farmers there spend a lot of time tidying up after campers.

What is clear is that a lot of harm caused by the public is due to a lack of knowledge. At one point, a co-leader of Right to Roam, Lewis Winks, was calling for access to field margins. Conservationists hit back by saying that these margins are vital refuges for wildlife and one of Mr Winks’s campaign colleagues admitted to me that they had got it wrong.

How is it that we have activists calling for nonsensical things? I would say it’s because they’ve been let down. If a farmer or landowner tells me the public doesn’t understand the countryside, I reply: ‘You’re probably right — but what have you done to change that?’ Now, more than ever, British farming needs to be telling its story and conservation-minded farmers should be required to facilitate educational visits in order to receive subsidy payments. Children should know exactly why field margins shouldn’t be thrown open. It’s about opportunities to understand the countryside, rather than wandering blindly across it.

In England and Wales, we have 140,000 miles of rights of way. If you joined them up and walked from one end to the other, it would be the equivalent of circling the globe six times. We do not lack access, but we do lack a culture that recognises the importance of the country-side as a place that supports life beyond the human and appreciates farming. One man’s playground is another man’s office.

‘Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our relationship with the countryside’ by Patrick Galbraith is out on April 24 (HarperCollins, £22)

A mere bunny hop, skip and a jump from London — thanks to the 1.26-hour train service from the village station to Paddington — this imposing, three-storey eyrie at the centre of Kingham in the tranquil Evenlode Valley is one of the most accessible of a plethora of smart hotels from which to reconnoitre this enduringly-popular area.

Built on the site of a medieval rabbit warren, the wisteria-clad The Wild Rabbit, once a farmhouse, was relaunched to great acclaim in 2013 by Lady Carole Bamford, who also masterminds the Daylesford Organic farmshop and wellness empire, The Fox at Lower Oddington, The Bell at Charlbury and The Three Horseshoes at Asthall.

Decorated in Lady Bamford’s signature style — a muted palette of taupe linens, caramel stone, blonde wood and eclectic (in this case, rabbit-themed) artwork — the hotel is a paean to its owner’s ethos of comfortable, yet incredibly spoiling accommodation, first-class local, seasonal food and relaxed (albeit exacting) service.

The rooms

Named after woodland creatures, the 13 bedrooms at the 17th century hotel itself (12 in the pub and one in a self-contained annexe) all scream the rustic chic that Lady Bamford is so well known for, including some with birch trunk four posters. Most have baths (with a shower above) panelled with little dry stone walls — in a nod to the distinctive field boundaries that snake across the surrounding sheep-studded landscape — and plenty of deliciously aromatic Bamford products to indulge in.

For me, however, the real highlight is the range of 32 self-catering cottages (above) that it’s possible to stay in throughout the village, which dates back to 200BC. I was lucky to be allocated the diminutive ‘Bantam’ (in a sweet little row, that’s also home to ‘Nestling’ and ‘Hatchling’) that has its own private garden and is only a one-minute walk from the hotel. Equipped with a white-rattan-doored kitchen, a cute single-oven Aga and a fridge stocked with Daylesford Organic eggs, butter and milk, my retreat also had a comfortable lounge area, an open fire and beds for my Labradors, Nimrod and Rocky. I was also struck by the hazel spindles of the staircase — which, along with the twig coat hooks behind the bathroom door, were hewn from timber felled on the Daylesford estate — leading to a neat bedroom and en suite, enhanced by a hanging rail cleverly concealed by a soft cream linen curtain.

‘In refurbishing these buildings, we’ve sought to honour and respect our surroundings by working with natural materials that are sourced locally,’ enthuses Lady Bamford. ‘I hope they convey a sense of the history of the area and offer you a connection to nature and the landscapes around you.’

Eating and drinking

Having been coaxed to begin with a spoiling ‘rhubarb and custard’ negroni, I opted for the tasting menu and wine pairing, featuring locally-foraged ingredients, along with meat and vegetables from the Bamfords’ estates and organic gardens. The wild garlic dumpling, morel, broad bean with Rachel cheese, followed by halibut, smoked crème fraîche, dill and kohlrabi were exceptional. Yet, the chicken, white asparagus, leek and hen of the woods, doused in an Amontillado sauce was so delectable that I wanted to lick the plate. As far as show-stopping puddings are concerned, however, the Daylesford blue, apple, thyme, honey, rhubarb — which involved a freeze dried ice blue cheese cream being spooned over slithers of apple fashioned into a shape of rose — was pretty impressive, as was the strawberry, sweet woodruff, hay and meadowsweet, accompanied by a glass of Nyetimber ‘Cuvee Chérie’ demi-sec.

How they’ll keep you busy

With more than 2,000 acres of organic farmland to explore, a stroll to nearby Daylesford, from where you can follow a range of signposted walks, is a must. Alternatively, the hotel reception staff can book you on a guided Nature trail.

What else to do while you’re there

When I visited in early summer, I took my dogs on lots of ambles through the village, where I marvelled at the range of architecture, the pretty cottage gardens and the insects buzzing on the fragrant flowers bedecking the many lime trees, as swifts screamed over the Cotswold stone rooftops. It’s also worth wandering up Church Street to The Kingham Plough, which serves a host of pub classics, such as a pint of prawns and a good old-fashioned ploughman’s board, with ham, Keen’s Cheddar and pickles.

Who is it for?

Perfect for anyone — particularly young, London-based couples in search of a bucolic mini-break — wanting to enjoy the myriad delights of the Cotswolds (Burford and Stow-on-the-Wold are a stone’s throw away) with the independence of residing in your own private cottage, with an excellent restaurant within walking distance.

What gives it the ‘wow’ factor?

All the small touches, such as the rabbit motifs on almost everything (including the tissue paper toppers on the round pats of Daylesford butter). As ever, though, in first-class establishments, it’s the skill of the staff that sets The Wild Rabbit apart. The restaurant and front of house staff were especially sensitive to the fact I was dining alone amid a profusion of couples and kindly sat me at a table in the corner, so that I could observe the goings on in the lively bar, without feeling too incongruous.

The one thing we’d change

Although the bright dining room at the back of the building affords an insight into the kitchen and a sneak peek down the glass-capped well, I didn’t feel the open plan space was as characterful and welcoming as the more traditional front bar area.

A night at The Kingham Cottages at The Wild Rabbit starts from £350.

In a dream world we’d all be able to take regular, week-long holidays to escape from the stresses of daily life. Indulgent travels to sun drenched locations where you can switch off your phone — and your brain — for days on end.

In reality though, that’s not always possible. There’s pesky work and parenting, and other adult-related responsibilities that, more often than not, means the time you’re left with to take a break only amounts to, well, a break: 48 or 72 hours, travel time included. However, not all is lost because many a British hotel is cottoning onto the fact that we’re time-strapped and…desperate.

Whether you choose to go full woo-woo or simply indulge in your favourite outdoor pursuit, it’s simply about taking the time to make you feel ‘well’: re-energised or relaxed, well-rested or well-fed, re-connected with Nature or disconnected from reality. That reset you desire could be just a short drive away.

Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons’s Dream Escape, Oxfordshire

Pulling up to Le Manoir, circling around Raymond Blanc’s self-designed sculpture in the car park (three metre tall artichokes, an ode to his favourite vegetable), trotting with your luggage down the lavender-lined path to the iconic 16th century building and greeted at reception by a glass of local sparkling wine (crisp and creamy, honeyish bubbles by Hundred Hills vineyard), equals all signs are pointing to a pretty dreamy stay.

With this particular package, however, dreams — or at least a good night's sleep — take centre stage. Staff are charged with creating a rural sanctuary so you’ll be given a snooze-inducing goodie bag: two silk eye masks, a breath-work guide book and Temple Spa’s ‘Do Not Disturb’ set of products which includes a pillow spray, bath oil and nighttime skincare. After you’ve enjoyed your supper you’ll find your turndown service had some extra touches too, like lavender scented bath salts and herbal tea ready to swim in and sip on.

The aforementioned supper is included and is, unsurprisingly considering the two Michelin stars that the restaurant has held for a record breaking 40 years, sensational. It’s fine dining at its best, all crisp white tablecloths, stinky cheese trolleys and geeky sommeliers (like the moustached Ben, who has a penchant for the surprising).

If you’re lucky you might get a moment with M. Blanc himself, who regularly roams the dining room chatting to guests. He may even be up for a selfie, but bear in mind he’s not a guaranteed part of the Dream Escape package — so we’d probably discourage asking him to tuck you into bed.

From £1,395 for two people.

Lime Wood’s Wild Wanderings retreat, New Forest

Lime Wood’s Wild Wanderings retreat is all about reconnecting with the outdoors, complete with forest bathing and ‘grounding’ (standing barefoot on anything but concrete, basically) — recently scientifically proven to reduce stress and boost mental health.

Your day centres around meditative walks through the New Forest trees, where you’re encouraged to zone out and immerse yourself in the ancient, green and hopefully not too rainy nature. Back at the property, in a custom-built, tented ‘hideout’, there’s a Pilates class, breathwork session and sound healing class to further melt you into a state of peak wellness, plus time to wallow around in the Herb House’s spa pools. A spa treatment is included and I strongly recommend you try one of their new Ayurvedic treatments designed by the wonderful Sheena, such as her Abhyanga ritual which involves her pouring a liberal amount of warm oil over your body (front and back, head to toe) and massaging away tension and troubles using long, firm strokes. I promise this is nicer than it sounds, though maybe not one for the prudish…

Sustenance comes in the form of lunch in the Herb House at the very healthy but delicious Raw & Cured restaurant (think bowls of spiced bean stew or colourful and crisp salads) and supper back in the hotel at Hartnett Holder & Co — where you’ll be pleased to hear that the whole roast Dover sole comes positively drowning in butter. After all, wellness is all about balance.

From £1,455 per night based on two people sharing.

Gleneagles’ Perthshire Peloton, Scotland

Personally, if I had 72 hours to indulge in a wellness break, I wouldn’t wish to spend most of it sweating in Lycra atop a bicycle. But, if Richmond Park on a Sunday morning is anything to go, the majority of London’s population would relish in the act. So pedal fast if you want to get a spot in Gleneagles’ Perthshire Peloton — a weekend for the cycling-crazed, hosted by Sir Chris Hoy.

After settling into your room you’ll saddle up and set off on a leisurely warm-up ride, which is essential as the next time you pop on your cleats it will be for a 115km journey through the (elevation heavy) Perthshire countryside, with local-born Hoy as your companion, riding beside — or, let’s face it, more likely behind — the six time Olympic Gold medallist.

Each evening you’ll feast with your fellow bikers, enjoying menus focused on locally sourced ingredients such as Scottish Wagyu beef which comes from a producer just over the road. If you have the energy for a nightcap be sure to visit The American Bar and ask for Andrea, who will mix you up one of her delicious concoctions (the spicy, smoky Gingery — a whisky and Mezcal mix — was my winner).

In your downtime there’s no chance of getting bored. Think of Gleneagles as a luxurious Centre Parcs, but without the water slides. And with Michelin-starred dining. And prize winning cocktail menus. And grand suites with soaring ceilings. So, not Centre Parcs at all actually, but there are activities aplenty, like playing padel in their shiny new Sporting Club or making friends with birds of prey via a falconry lesson.

I’d be most inclined to direct you to their spa, and more specifically to lead therapist Anna who is a magician at digging out knots and kneading away stress — potentially needed after hauling yourself over the highlands all day.

April 25-27, 2025; from £2,995 a night.

PoB Hotels’ Nurture Your Soul retreat

Pride of Britain Hotels represent a whole host of luxury hotels across the UK (54 and counting), but this year they also want to look after you, via one of their Nurture Your Soul retreats. If you’re a wellness sceptic this might be the one for you because it’s not all woo-woo gurus and whale music; there’s stargazing in West Sussex, yoga on the Durham coast or gong bathing in Abergavenny (ok that does admittedly sound a tad woo-woo).

Their hotels are all hand-picked and given the PoB zhuzh, meaning there’s a high set standard across them all when it comes to service, style and guest experience — if you know of Relais & Châteaux it’s like that, but UK only. Take The Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath for example, an exquisite Georgian (duh) property sat at the top of the city overlooking Victoria Park. Hidden behind its facade are impeccably decorated suites (book The Beckford if you can, a tastefully colourful suite with views down to the River Avon) and vast courtyard, through which you’ll find the restaurant and spa.

During the 24 hour retreat there which has a calming and recuperating theme, you’ll have a 90 minute(!) yoga class, tasty plant-focused supper and hour-long breathwork session, plus plenty of time to stroll around the historic city. You should leave a feeling perhaps a little bendier, and hopefully more balanced than when you arrived.

The remains of chariots, wagons, iron tyres, elaborate pony harnesses and ceremonial spears are among the 800 objects that make up a newly discovered Iron Age hoard near Melsonby, North Yorkshire, announces Historic England (HE), as it prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Initial assessments suggest the objects were buried in the 1st century AD, at about the time of the Roman Conquest of southern Britain. ‘It’s an exceptional find, the biggest and most important Iron Age hoard ever found in Britain,’ says Duncan Wilson, chief executive of HE, which gave more than £120,000 in grant funding to the excavation, carried out by Durham University archaeologists with advice from the British Museum. ‘It’s fascinating to speculate that it may represent the remains of funeral pyres, alongside the road to the Iron Age hill fort of Stanwick.’

The organisation will mark its anniversary on April 1, honouring a decade of historic buildings and monuments advisory, previously administered by English Heritage. Wilson, who stands down from the role he has held throughout the period, this year, says the change brought ‘clarity to our role as a champion for the wider historic environment, the contribution heritage can make to growth and what it can do for communities’. Among the successes he points to is launching the National Blue Plaque Scheme outside London (2023) and the High Streets Heritage Action Zone programme (2020–24) — ‘England’s first heritage-led regeneration programme to go beyond restoration, redefining how high streets can be revitalised, encouraging people to visit local high streets and breathing new life into them’. Sixty-seven high streets, from Bedford to Burnley, received targeted funding, with 723 historic buildings repaired, 462 shopfronts restored and many previously vacant buildings returned to use.

Meanwhile, the Heritage at Risk Register has just been handed an extra £15 million from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to expand its grant programme. ‘Our research indicates that England could gain up to 670,000 new homes by repurposing and repairing vacant historic buildings, including many that appear on the Register,’ explains Wilson. A high-profile, one-time At Risk case is Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings: ‘Almost a year ago, The Queen visited the site. This huge, once derelict, iron-frame building, internationally recognised as the grandparent of the world’s first skyscrapers, is now open after an extensive £28 million, eight-year regeneration project led by us. It’s been reborn as a learning space for the public and a flexible office space.’

An archaeologist by profession, he considers the 2016 discovery of a perfectly preserved Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire — ‘Peterborough’s Pompeii’ — as a personal highlight during his time as chief executive. ‘On one day when I visited, they’d just unearthed the most complete Bronze Age wheel in Britain,’ he remembers. ‘It was hard to overrate my delight at seeing the complete roundhouses, with their structural members intact and surrounded by a palisade, emerging from the Fenland mud after 3,000 years.’ Wilson is to continue his involvement with heritage via non-executive roles with Chatham Historic Dockyard and the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich.