The Isle of Skye on a Small Group Tour: Dunvegan Castle, Armadale and Portree

The Isle of Skye on a Small Group Tour: Dunvegan Castle, Armadale and Portree Skye is the largest of the Inner Hebrides and, for many people, the island that defines the Highlands: volcanic ridges, sea lochs on every side, and a history of clans, a fugitive prince and the crofting townships emptied by the Clearances. […]

Orkney Tours for Mature Travellers: Skara Brae, Gurness Broch and Neolithic Orkney

Orkney Tours for Mature Travellers: Skara Brae, Gurness Broch and Neolithic Orkney Orkney lies barely ten kilometres off the north coast of mainland Scotland, yet it holds the densest concentration of prehistoric sites in Britain. Five thousand years ago its farmers were building stone villages with dressers and box beds, while the pyramids of Giza […]

Shetland Tours for Mature Travellers: Jarlshof, Mousa and Four Days on the Islands

Shetland Tours for Mature Travellers: Jarlshof, Mousa and Four Days on the Islands Shetland sits closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh. It was ruled from Norway until 1469, its place names are still largely Norse, and on a clear day at Sumburgh Head the cliffs seem to lean out towards the open North Atlantic. On […]

England’s Estate Villages: Planned Settlements, Paternalism and Rural Design

England’s Estate Villages: Planned Settlements, Paternalism and Rural Design Some English villages grew slowly, house by house, as families built where and how they could. Others were made by a single owner. In an estate village, the land, the cottages, the school and often the church belonged to the landed family at the big house, […]

Cotswold Wool Churches: Trade, Parish and Perpendicular Architecture

Cotswold Wool Churches: Trade, Parish and Perpendicular Architecture Some of the finest parish churches in England stand in small Cotswold towns that today seem far too modest for them. Their tall towers, great windows and carved porches were paid for, in large part, by the late-medieval wool trade, when the wool of the Cotswold sheep, […]

Yorkshire Dry-Stone Walls: Building the Boundaries of the Dales

Yorkshire Dry-Stone Walls: Building the Boundaries of the Dales Look across almost any valley in the Yorkshire Dales and the first thing you notice is the net of grey walls laid over the green: tight, crooked enclosures around the villages, then larger fields on the lower slopes, then long straight lines marching up the fellsides […]

Dartmoor Longhouses: Reading the Farmsteads of Moorland Devon

Dartmoor Longhouses: Reading the Farmsteads of Moorland Devon On the edges of Dartmoor, where the walled fields give way to open moor, stand long, low farmhouses of grey granite, set down the slope of the hill with their backs to the weather. Many are Dartmoor longhouses: homes in which a farming family and its cattle […]

English Villages on Screen: Film Heritage, Preservation and Everyday Life

English Villages on Screen: Film Heritage, Preservation and Everyday Life Many travellers arrive in an English village already knowing what it looks like, because they have seen it on screen. Lacock has appeared in Pride and Prejudice, Cranford and two Harry Potter films; Castle Combe was dressed as a fishing port for Doctor Dolittle; Port […]

Devon Longhouses: Hearth, Shippon and the Working Rural House

Devon Longhouses: Hearth, Shippon and the Working Rural House Many of the old farmhouses scattered across the Devon countryside began life sheltering cattle as well as people. A Devon longhouse was a single long building in which a farming household lived at one end and its cattle wintered at the other, with a passage between […]

Hever Castle: Anne Boleyn, Tudor Memory and the Country-House Landscape

Hever Castle: Anne Boleyn, Tudor Memory and the Country-House Landscape Hever Castle looks like the perfect Tudor survival: a small stone castle rising from its moat in the Kent countryside, the family home of Anne Boleyn, where Henry VIII came courting. The truth is more interesting. Hever’s walls are medieval, its Boleyn rooms are a […]

Castle Combe: The Making of a Cotswold Wool Village

Castle Combe: The Making of a Cotswold Wool Village Castle Combe is usually photographed from the bridge: the brook in the foreground, the stone cottages climbing the street, the church tower above. It is a lovely view, but it hides the more interesting story. Castle Combe’s history is industrial. In the fifteenth century this small […]

Dartmoor Commons: Rights, Grazing and the Making of a Moorland Landscape

Dartmoor Commons: Rights, Grazing and the Making of a Moorland Landscape Cross Dartmoor by road and the moor looks like wilderness: open, unfenced, grazed by ponies that seem to belong to no one. It is nothing of the kind. Almost every acre of the high moor is owned, almost every pony has an owner, and […]

Port Isaac: Fishing, Pilchards and the Evolution of a Cornish Harbour Village

Port Isaac: Fishing, Pilchards and the Evolution of a Cornish Harbour Village Port Isaac fills a narrow cleft in the slate cliffs of north Cornwall, its cottages packed so tightly down the valley sides that the lanes between them are barely wider than a person. Every part of that plan was shaped by the sea. […]

Cotswold Stone: Geology, Craft and the Golden Village Landscape

Cotswold Stone: Geology, Craft and the Golden Village Landscape Most English regions are recognised by their landscape. The Cotswolds are recognised by a building material. Walls, roofs, churches, barns, field boundaries and gateposts are made of the same limestone, quarried from beneath the same hills, so that the villages seem to grow out of the […]

England’s Villages Itinerary: How to Read a 19-Day Rural History Journey

England’s Villages Itinerary: How to Read a 19-Day Rural History Journey A list of overnight stops says very little about a journey. Our small group tour of England’s villages runs for nineteen days from London to Royal Tunbridge Wells, by way of Sussex, Wiltshire, Dorset, Cornwall, Devon, the Cotswolds, the Peak District, the Lake District […]

Weald and Downland Open Air Museum: Rebuilding England’s Rural Past

Weald and Downland Open Air Museum: Rebuilding England’s Rural Past In a fold of the South Downs at Singleton, near Chichester, a medieval farmhouse from Kent stands a few minutes’ walk from a Tudor kitchen, a seventeenth-century watermill and a Victorian pair of cottages from Surrey. None of them was built here. Each was taken […]

Lacock Abbey and Village: Monastic Estate to Screen Heritage

Lacock Abbey and Village: Monastic Estate to Screen Heritage Walk down Church Street in Lacock and it is hard to say which century you are in. The stone and timber-framed houses, the fifteenth-century church, the inns and the great medieval barn have survived together because for almost seven hundred years most of the village belonged […]

Avebury Stone Circle: A Living Neolithic Landscape in a Wiltshire Village

Avebury Stone Circle: A Living Neolithic Landscape in a Wiltshire Village Most prehistoric monuments are visited. Avebury is lived in. The Avebury stone circle, the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world, encloses part of a working Wiltshire village: a lane runs between the sarsens, sheep graze the ditch, and a pub, cottages and farm […]

Brunel’s Thames Tunnel: The First Tunnel Beneath a Navigable River

Brunel’s Thames Tunnel: The First Tunnel Beneath a Navigable River London Overground trains run beneath the Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping every day, and few passengers notice that they are travelling through one of the most stubborn engineering projects of the nineteenth century. The Brunel Thames Tunnel took eighteen years to build, from 1825 to […]

Stockton and Darlington Railway: Coal, Passengers and the First Public Steam Railway

Stockton and Darlington Railway: Coal, Passengers and the First Public Steam Railway On 27 September 1825 a small steam engine called Locomotion set off from Shildon in County Durham at the head of a long train of coal wagons, most of them crowded with people who had not been invited. A few hours later the […]

Derwent Valley Mills: Cromford Water Power and the Factory Landscape

Derwent Valley Mills: Cromford Water Power and the Factory Landscape In the narrow limestone valley at Cromford in Derbyshire, a tall gritstone mill stands behind a wall of severe stone buildings, with a village of workers’ houses climbing the hill beside it. This is where Richard Arkwright began spinning cotton by water power in 1771, […]