Snowshill

Snowshill is a hilltop village set high and a little apart, looking out over the Vale of Evesham, and it is best known for the house at its heart. Snowshill Manor is a sixteenth-century stone house that the architect and collector Charles Paget Wade filled, over a lifetime, with more than twenty thousand objects: clocks, instruments, bicycles, toys, and suits of Japanese samurai armour. He gave it to the National Trust in 1951 and lived not in the manor but in the small priest's house beside it, leaving the great rooms to the collection.

The village around it is small, stone, and quiet, with a green and the church of St Barnabas, which despite the age of the place is a Victorian rebuild of 1864. Just outside it lie the lavender fields, planted at the turn of the century and running to some thirty-five acres, which turn the hillside violet through June and July and bring the one reliable crowd of the year.

Out of lavender season the village goes back to its quiet, high and a little weatherbeaten on its ridge.

Snowshill is the kind of place that holds a great deal more than it shows from the road, which in this country is rather the point, and rather the rule.