The ring-doughnut of unvisited places

In this country, my wife and I travel to two sorts of places. There are those we can get to and back easily in a day, and those sufficiently far away to require one or more overnight stays. The ones we can visit in a day form a sort of circle around our house in West Worcestershire. The limits of this circle to the North are Birmingham and Solihull, where we visit family. Any further North requires a trip up the grim M6 through the Black Country, and is therefore avoided. The limit to the East is Oxford, which we can reach by (a very slow) train. To the South, our limits for a day-trip are Gloucester and the pleasant market-town of Cirencester, while to the West we go over the Welsh border as far as Llandrindod Wells and Welshpool.

Places which require an overnight stay such as London or Devon are of course about a 100 or more miles away. But between the circle of day-trips and the wider area of overnight-stays is a ring-doughnut-shaped area that we never usually visit. These are places just too far to travel to and from with pleasure in a day, but too close to justify booking and paying for a hotel. In our case, this ring-doughnut of unvisited places includes many locations with much to offer - places like Wiltshire, the Thames Valley below Oxford, Derbyshire, and inland mid-Wales.

Anyway, my wife and I decided that the time has come to visit places within the ring-doughnut, and last weekend we headed for a two-night stay in Lacock, about 75 miles from our home. Lacock is a very picturesque village owned by the National Trust - so picturesque in fact that (together with Lacock Abbey) it has been used as a setting for about 50 films and television programmes. The day we arrived, there was shooting for Downton Abbey just along the street from our hotel. The square in front of the parish church was arranged to look like a country market-place in the 1920s, with cows, sheep and pigs, local extras in hats and long coats, and a vintage van. Most of the shooting seemed to involve standing around, with very brief intervals of action. I wonder how many minutes of television time resulted from the two days of filming.

Our inn in Lacock was the Sign of the Angel - a wooden-frame building said to date from the 1400s. There are low beams, huge fireplaces and creaky wooden stairs. The floors on the ground-floor had stone flags - those in the bedrooms on the first floor pitched in all directions. The inn too has been a filmset - for one of the Harry Potter stories. We ate excellent meals (and especially breakfasts) at the Sign of the Angel, and slept well in one of the inn’s five bedrooms. On the Saturday, we visited Lacock Abbey and the Fox-Talbot museum of photography (named after one of the main inventors of photography who lived in the Abbey). We also took a train to Bath.

We discovered that one of the joys of holidaying in the ring-doughnut of unvisited places is that we are in no hurry to drive there and back. So on the way, we stopped at Stow-in-the-Wold, saw Lechlade and visited Avebury - a village enclosed in a vast prehistoric stone circle and embankment. On the way back, we stopped at Newark Park. This is a much-expanded Elizabethan hunting lodge on the top of the Cotswold Edge, overlooking the wide Severn Valley. This is probably the only British stately home to be restored by a gay American ex-servicemen.