By Candida Lycett Green, on January 23rd, 2013% 
It was early evening when we decided to branch off the main road from Exeter to Plymouth and find the hamlet of Torbryan. I had heard it was a beautiful place and on the ordnance survey map it looked near enough: “Only a short diversion,” I said. From Ashburton we climbed Whistley Hill up a grass middled lane, dark in the shade of twelve foot high Devon banks. At the top, through a gateway, there was a brief glimpse of a freshly mown hay field sloping away down to a lush wood in the valley below and beyond to endless . . . → Read More: Unwrecked England: Torbryan, Devon
By Candida Lycett Green, on January 16th, 2013% 
Woolstone lies under the “Manger”, a deep shadowy combe half encircled by voluptuous folds of chalk downland. Aldous Huxley found the latter so magnificent that he nearly fell off his bicycle on first seeing it. (He later wrote in Chrome Yellow that the curves of down “were as fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the subtlety of art.”) Below the Manger, hidden in a steep wooded hollow the river Ock springs from the hillside, feeds a secret lake and eventually rushes down into the heart of the village beside Waterfall Cottage. It is Woolstone’s . . . → Read More: Unwrecked England: Woolstone, Oxfordshire
By Candida Lycett Green, on December 19th, 2012% 
When we were small, my parents used to hire a rowing boat at Lechlade and row my brother and me upstream along the wandering upper reaches of the river Thames. The patches of yellow water lilies in still backwaters are still there sixty years on and the willowherb and purple loosestrife still flood the banks in summer. We used to swim in the deep pools under the willows, mud oozing through our toes as we clambered out onto the meadow’s edge where cattle had broken down the bank to drink.
. . . → Read More: Unwrecked England: Inglesham, Wiltshire
By Candida Lycett Green, on November 28th, 2012% 
In Midsomer Murder country, a stone’s throw from Amersham, the village of Coleshill straddles a high ridge on the edge of the Chilterns. It is only twenty miles from London but the country around it is unexpectedly unwrecked and remote-feeling. I came to it from Winchmore Hill, where for a brief spell Barbara Windsor lent her glamour by owning the Plough Inn. Past eighteenth century Hertfordshire House and a Victorian lodge, its date written in bottle bottoms set into the brick, a winding, high hedged lane led up and up to Coleshill’s wooded height. From gardens and gateways all around . . . → Read More: Unwrecked England: Coleshill, Buckinghamshire
By Candida Lycett Green, on November 21st, 2012% 
The oysters of Whitstable are fabled. The actress Rachel Stirling, star of Sarah Waters’ “Tipping the Velvet “, learnt how to shuck them on Whitstable beach. “I remember this fisherman bringing a cooler box full of a thousand pounds worth of oysters, fresh from the oyster beds in the estuary. He showed me how to prize them open: I’ve never had a feast like it since.” She played Nancy Astley, a Whitstable fishmonger’s daughter who falls in love with a male impersonator acting in the local theatre. That the lesbian/gay proclivity for Whitstable as a seaside destination was greatly enhanced . . . → Read More: Wheelers Oyster Bar, Whitstable, Kent
By Candida Lycett Green, on November 14th, 2012% 
The village of Spelsbury does not take up many column inches in the guide book. The golden stoned village seems uneventful as it straggles along the main road between Chipping Norton and Charlbury. There are some handsome seventeenth century almshouses, a drinking water fountain under a stone sunburst niche which Pevsner describes as “hideous” (I loved it),and the village’s main claim to fame is that it lies in the very heart of David Cameron Country. Enormous private estates all around such as Cornbury and Blenheim roll out their beautiful acres and pheasant- filled woods as far as the eye can . . . → Read More: Unwrecked England: Spelsbury, Oxfordshire
By Candida Lycett Green, on October 31st, 2012% 
If you want to experience being abroad without going beyond our shore line, its not hard to do. Stand on the bridge over the lake in St James’s park and look south towards the houses of parliament and you could be in Moscow; drive through the wide grid-patterned streets of Carterton in Oxfordshire and you might just as well be on the outskirts of Cincinnati; but stand on the terrace at Stackpole, where a great house once stood, and look down at the mysterious lake at the deep foot of the steep hanging woods, and you are in the Amazon. . . . → Read More: Unwrecked Wales: Stackpole, Pembrokeshire
By Candida Lycett Green, on October 19th, 2012% 
Over on the far west side of Ibstone Common past the little church of St Nicholas with its weatherboarded bell turret, the way leads down through Bowleys Wood. When Rupert and I were there, the towering beech trees hanging to the steep hillside were in their earliest pale green leaf and shires of blue bells stretched away beneath on either side. On down and out of the tree line we passed banks of early purple orchids, a bee orchid among them, and eventually reached the level pasture below. Here in this deep and secret valley in the Chilterns was an . . . → Read More: Unwrecked England: Wormsley Ground, Buckinghamshire
By Candida Lycett Green, on October 3rd, 2012% 
They say that two pilgrimages to St David’s are worth one to Rome. The antique dealer, Christopher Gibbs and I have just made our first. We took the train from Swindon to Swansea, and then joined a branch line which followed the edge of the sea and stopped at Llanelli, Burry, Pembrey, Kidwelly to Ferryside where the track then curved round to take us up the ravishing wooded estuary of the River Towy. Across the water in a little sandy bay the village of Llansteffan showed off everything the doctor ordered. A ravishing ruined castle on a small hill looking . . . → Read More: Unwrecked England (and Wales): St David’s Peninsula, Pemrokeshire
By Candida Lycett Green, on September 26th, 2012% 
In this mild, unnoticed corner of Northamptonshire the village of Canons Ashby is now nothing more than a few cottages and a strange truncated church full of Dryden memorials but once, before the Black Death, it had been much bigger. That was when the Augustinian canons had their priory here and their great fishponds were well stocked. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the priory had gone and this beautiful house had evolved – always quiet, always unassuming. “Everything appears to be a natural growth of the circumstances,” wrote the architect J A Gotch in 1921, “ not calling . . . → Read More: Unwrecked England: Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire
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