f
TRAVEL
Foreign travel is still somewhat of a lottery. Fear not, for we are blessed in our country with an astonishing range of landscapes, vistas, walks and sights. Jim Sherwood picks just a (highly subjective) few of the best on a tour of Britain.
B
ritain is rich in beauties, some granted us by nature, some made by us, all of its own. What follows are just a few of those places that will remind you just how favoured our island is, how kind it has been to us and how fortunate we are to have such an abundance of beauty right here, on our doorstep. Wheal Coates, south of St Agnes, Cornwall. A cathedral of a former tin mine, its pumping-engine house, ruined but stoic, pushes its stone, 19th-century chimney skywards still. Polperro, Cornwall. Whitewashed houses dig their fingers in to the cleft of the coombe that leads down to a harbour as miniature as the seas beyond it appear vast. The final word in picturesque Cornish fishing villages.
you an unending view of the moors that stretches long back into geological time. Clifton Suspension Bridge, Somerset. Proof that humankind can be as monumental as nature. Black Down, south of Haslemere, Sussex. The track from the car park below gently traverses woodlands of birch, beech and Scots pine before delivering you to heaven. From the top of Black Down, cresting a sandstone ridge, you stare out over the woods and fields of the Weald. Lord Tennyson described is as “green Sussex fading into blue, with one grey glimpse of sea.” Malmesbury Abbey, west of Swindon, Wiltshire. Visit just for the south porch to this 12th-century church, its eight arches depicting Biblical scenes. Some of the finest figurative Norman carving in Britain.
Thrift Wood, Essex. Once the county was blanketed in wildwood. Now all that is left to us is this wonderful sliver of coppiced trees, encompassed by ancient lanes and dense hedges. For you to marvel: a wood as it would have looked a thousand years back. Blakeney Point, Norfolk. A narrow pebble spit that conducts you to a scene wilder with every step you take. At its tip you can watch as seals heave themselves out of the water, as wintering geese and ducks land, and, in summer, as plovers search for food. Mam Tor, Derbyshire. A mountain that shivers off chunks of shale rock, shedding itself quietly into the scree slips and the valley below.
Beautiful Our beaches range from sandy to shingly, rugged to idyllic
Polzeath Beach, north of Wadebridge, Cornwall. Funnelled by the pincers of jutting headlands, the waves crash on Polzeath beach to the delight of surfers. On calmer days, the soft sand squeezes between your toes as if it were silk. Dartmoor, Devon. Travel anywhere here and you will encounter airy uplands, the granite outcrops sitting bold and spare, sliced by the cooling lava flows that formed them, coombes secreted amidst the tors, expanses of moorland and a Gothic inspiration. But head especially for St Michael’s Church at Brentor, perched gaunt and unyielding atop a column of rock that rises a hundred feet above the moors and the fields. Grimspound, south of Moretonhampstead, Devon. In 2000 BC a Bronze Age community thrived here. The three-metre thick walls built to protect the circular enclosure still stand, guarding all that remains of the huts – the cooking pits and the stone slabs which served as beds. Behind you millennia of human history, before
20. Thame Out
Britain’s woodland walks are a delight
Ruins are picturesque