Three Corners of England

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

London bustles with such excitement tourists tend to arrive, stay put, and never check out the country beyond the city. No wonder. Not only do the British talk funny, but they drive badly and on the wrong side of the road to boot. In addition, the roads are congested, the signs confusing, and the pedestrians careless. Yet it's worth a couple of days to get among the English and drive along their narrow lanes, past their overgrown hedgerows stone houses, and tiny postage stamp gardens, and up to their mansions and churchyards and inns.

So once you've recovered from jet lag, spent a day watching the Donald Duck-sized sedans scoot along the highway, and studied your maps a little, here are three directions to wander off in if you want to see this Monty Python land called England.

If you head west from London's Heathrow Airport on the M3 Motorway, three hours later you'll reach Salisbury Plain and one of the most spectacular religious sites in the world, Stonehenge. Some of its huge monoliths date back to 1900 BC.

Beyond it, the road runs on between the counties of Somerset and Devon to Cornwall -- spread-eagled in the sea like a thumb of an ocean hitchhiker, the last land seen by the Pilgrims as they headed into the Atlantic almost four centuries ago.

This area may have produced giants in our colonial history, but now it's scaled down to human size, with tiny villages like Lostwithiel and Lizard, Gweek and Gwithian, Mousehole, West Looe, and Lands End.

Every village has a small hotel or an ancient inn. It's hard to go wrong with any of them, but it's a good idea to find them on the map and check them out online, and book in advance. Most have just a few rooms, like the Drewe Arms Hotel in Broadhembury, Devon; the Spears Cross Hotel in Dunster, Somerset; Tolvadden Cottage Hotel in Marazion, Cornwall. Check them out at TripAdvisor.com.

Don't always expect to understand what the natives say to you. The words are English, but the accents defy description, gutteral brassy booming tongues like the waves breaking on the nearby shores. If in doubt, talk about the weather -- a west countryman's favorite subject.

"What's the weather going to be like today?," we asked a thickset balding Cornishman with a magnificent "Flying Officer Kite" mustache. He peered up into a bright blue sky, twirled his mustache, and said, "Rain."

“There's not a cloud in the sky! How can you say that?," we countered.

"Always rains in Cornwall," he replied, closing the subject.

Be warned-bring a brolly (umbrella) and a hat.

After a dawdle along narrow lanes, you'll want a fast route back to London. Fortunately the M5 Motorway to Bristol then the M4 to London is as speedy as an American interstate.

About 100 miles northwest of London lies a cluster of villages called the Cotswolds, the great sprawling land of the wealthy sheep farmers of England's Middle Ages.

Essentially bypassed by the Industrial Revolution, the whole area retains a sense of peace seldom found today in the western world. The Cotswolds cling to their past.

Here are houses built with a strange honey-colored limestone unique to the area, with roofs sometimes slate, sometimes thatched. The grass shines with an intense green that would make a sheep walk a mile just for a chew of it. The streams gurgling past the village are so clear and full of shining pebbles you'd think you'd wandered into an "English Village" at Epcot Center, but it's real enough and you may get a sudden rain shower to prove the point.

There's almost too much to see: Churchill's Blenheim and George Washington's family's Sulgrave Manor. There's Oxford, one of the world's great universities, and Broadway, with one of America's favorite inns, the Lygon Arms. There's Chipping Campden, a magnificent church competing with rows of medieval houses, and other villages with names as fascinating as their appearance: Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-on-the-Water, Wooten-Under-Edge, Moreton-in-Marsh.

It's only about a three-hour drive from London up the M40 to Oxford and on to the Woodstock and lunch at the Bear Hotel, now part of the Macdonald Hotels group. Then the Cotswolds lie before you in all their innocence.

The South Downs lie 50 miles south of London. They're closer now because of the M25 ring route around London and the M23/A20's fast run down to the sea

The biggest attraction is Brighton. Formerly a fishing village called Brighthelmstone, it changed its name when it became a fashionable health spa at the beginning of the 19th century.

Brighton is a popular resort with the British. There's always a crowd on summer weekends.

Brighton has a famous racecourse and aquarium, promenades and piers, streets and streets of fine Regency architecture, and quaint boutiques and antique shops in the lanes, but the pride of Brighton is the Royal Pavilion.

This building was the 1787 dream child of the Prince of Wales, who became George IV and reigned in Britain from 1820 to 1830.

Proving that the mental imbalances of his ancestors (which lost the American colonies for Britain) were not completely laid to rest, the young heir to the British throne rented a farmhouse in Brighton in 1786 and in the next 30 years turned it into a vast sprawling Indian inspired fantasy -- a sort of Versailles-by-the-Sea

Despite current renovations, it's still worth the hour's ride from London. Yet you might wonder how a king could spend so much money at a time of such social unrest in his country. You wonder this especially when the French had guillotined Louis XVI a mere 30 years before King George completed his building and "confessed he cried for joy when he contemplated the Pavilion's splendors."

You might choose to swing east a bit into Kent, the county that rejoices in the name, “The Garden of England.” There you will find The Leather Bottle, the quaint inn where Charles Dickens and his bride apparently spent their honeymoon in Room Six. The inn is a canting half-timbered building that started as The George in 1525 and was updated with its new name in 1629. Its room rates contrast nicely with the Cotswolds where inns surely are a bit pricey.

For further information check Visit Britain. Be aware that Britain’s national carrier, British Airlines, is increasing its UK-USA service. For example, Seattle is going from 10 flights a week to 13; Washington, DC 21 to 24 and JFK from 51 to 55 flights.