Castle Combe

Castle Combe is regularly called the prettiest village in England, and it lies over the line in Wiltshire rather than Gloucestershire, tucked into a wooded valley on the By Brook in the far south of the Cotswolds. It takes its name from a castle that has long since gone from the hill above. What is left is almost unreasonably complete: a single street of weavers' cottages running down to the brook, a fourteenth-century market cross where three lanes meet, and the church of St Andrew with a faceless medieval clock that has kept time without a dial for five hundred years.

There are no television aerials in the protected heart of the village, no overhead wires, nothing to fix it in the present century, which is why the cameras keep coming. War Horse and Stardust were both filmed in these lanes, and Doctor Dolittle before them.

The Manor House sits in its own grounds at the top of the village, a country-house hotel where the lane gives way to gardens and a river.

On a summer afternoon the village is a film set with the public let in. Come early, or come out of season, and it returns to being what it has always been, which is somewhere people would rather be left alone.