Sunday morning, under a tree in Eden. Pink and naked and statuesque against
the sunrise, Long Meg gyrates. And I move with her — how could I resist? On
the hilltop nearby, a ring of others writhe too, profaning the Sabbath with
their serpentine sun dance. Some are Meg’s lovers, some her daughters, and
together they throw weird, seductive shadows, an orgy in granite.
William Wordsworth, no mean judge of a landscape, reckoned the Long Meg stone
circle (350ft across, 69 megaliths in all) ranked second only to Stonehenge
for “relick” drama. He wrote a sonnet about it. And it’s in Cumbria, our
most drop-dead gorgeous county. Yet somehow I’ve got the place all to myself
on a Sunday morning — which triggers the sudden, slightly hallucinogenic
urge to dance among the stones.
Down the hill, in the village of Little Salkeld, the man at the fuchsia-pink
watermill (18th-century, full working order, 13 organic flours, frequent
guided tours, zero other visitors) tells me it is more than usual to find
Meg and her familiars frolicking alone.
“We live here, so we know it’s fantastic up there,” he smiles.
“Magic, some say. You know, a coven. Copulating. Petrified for their sins. But
we don’t get hundreds of tourists — we’re on the wrong side of the M6.”
And I’m thinking: “The right side, you mean.”
As the motorway forges north from Manchester to Carlisle, the mass-tourism
caravan mostly turns left into Lakeland. Which leaves this creamy slice of
Cumbria to the east, carved off by the M6, with a compelling name: the Eden
Valley. Few folk make it here. Which means more magic for me.
From Little Salkeld, I strike out towards the river on a lane shadowing the
Settle-Carlisle railway, said to be England’s loveliest line, and dating
from an era when civil engineers were aesthetes as well as pragmatists. Its
tracks surge north through 50-odd miles of valley (you can hop on and off
the train to explore), ornamenting the water meadows with viaducts, pink and
elegant as vaulting salmon.
There is one right here: seven arches, 60ft high, marvellous. Then a steam
engine comes smoking and tooting across it — impeccable timing, as if
scheduled by the tourist board for a final scenic flourish.
This is an archetypal stretch of Eden. The river carves fat meanders through
the pasture lands, then funnels between rust-red sandstone cliffs. On the
near horizon, the North Pennine hills, with their scars and edges, menace
the valley. To the west, more hazily, I can make out the hunchbacked fells
of Lakeland. But Eden itself is all innocence, with just the skitter of a
red squirrel to dent the silence.
Soon I’m at Lacy’s Caves, a fairy-tale grotto chiselled straight into a
riverside crag by Colonel Sam Lacy, a bonkers Georgian squire. The colonel
hosted parties here, hiring a full-time hermit to gibber in the shadows for
added picturesqueness. All credit to the old nutcase — it’s a
heart-squeezingly romantic spot, the kind of place Frodo Baggins might build
for weekends off from ring-bearing.
There is nobody about, so I can gibber away happily, disturbed only by a
single skinny ewe that has wandered into the woods. Even sheep are loners in
Eden.
The eccentricity of Lacy’s Caves suits the valley, which has that vaguely
surreal atmosphere I’ve often felt in places off the beaten track. Not
surreal — otherworldly. Its main “visitor attraction”, unless you count
assorted Norman castles in beguiling disarray (Appleby, Brough, Pendragon),
is Eden Ostrich World, at Langwathby, dedicated to the second-funniest
creature on earth. What’s even funnier? To find out, make for the Alpaca
Centre in nearby Stainton, where for £1 you can hear Andean herbivores
humming.
The people can be surprisingly exotic, too. Eden has long attracted
freethinkers and rat-race refugees — people such as Andrew Whitley, a former
producer with the BBC Russian Service, who decamped to Melmerby 30 years ago
to launch an organic bread-making commune.
Melmerby is the essential Eden village — clutch of silver cottages; vast,
dapper church — and I find that the Village Bakery Restaurant is a mighty
fine place for a pear and walnut bruschetta and a natter with the locals.
“People didn’t think the bakery would come off at first,” a lady named Joyce
tells me, dribbling Borrowdale teabread crumbs down her cardie. “They didn’t
know what organic meant. And Andrew used to wear a kaftan. He’s sold this
place now, of course, but he still runs the bread-making workshops here.”
Whitley’s success seems to have sparked a foodie revolution in the valley.
Self-caterers could now happily compile a four-course dinner menu entirely
from artisanal Eden nosh: fresh soups from Jeremy’s in
Appleby-in-Westmorland; bacon and hams from Slacks of Penrith; handmade
chocolates from Kennedys in Orton; cheeses from Thornby Moor. Tour and
taste, or pick up the lot in one bite at the Tastes of Eden deli in Appleby.
Glad I’m not self-catering, though. That would mean missing out on Augill
Castle, up the valley towards Kirkby Stephen, a kind of mad-haired take on
the country-house hotel that is completely in tune with the strangeness of
the vale. The owners, Simon and Wendy Bennett, have filled its grandiose
gothic turrets with creaky furniture, friendly labradors, free-range
children, huge pillows and top food. Colonel Lacy would have loved it.
It's here that I spend the evening scoffing local lamb and musing on my
morning walking in Eden, a valley unsullied by human hand. In seven miles on
the trail, I encountered one stone circle, one watermill, one gothic folly
and precisely two other people. And no snakes.
The details: Little Salkeld Watermill and Tearoom (01768
881523, www.organicmill.co.uk) is open from January 29; tours £3.50. For the
Settle-Carlisle children, huge pillows and top food. Colonel Lacy would have
881811, www.village-bakery.com) in Melmerby is open daily; for details of
Whitley’s bread-making course, visit www.breadmatters.com. evening, scoffing
local lamb and musing on my morning walk in Eden, a valley unsullied Augill
Castle (01768 341937, www.stayinacastle.com) has doubles from £140 per
night, B&B; a four-course dinner is served on Friday and Saturday (£35;
book in advance).
Alternatively, there is Temple Sowerby House (017683 61578,
www.templesowerby.com; doubles from £115), at Temple Sowerby, another place
that combines smart living and great food with dressed-down friendliness.
For more information about the Eden Valley, visit
www.hiddentreasurescumbria.com.
Three more secrets
SPEYSIDE
My friend Denise has a beach named after her on the Moray coast. Not just any
old beach: a pristine pink beach that gambols out for ages beneath deserted
dunes, with forest and mountains zigzagging behind, maybe an osprey wheeling
overhead. When the sun’s out, it could be St Lucia.
Actually, it couldn’t, because there is nobody on it except for Denise. And
that’s my point: locals call it after her because her walks there are so
often spent in beatific solitude. This is Spey Bay, a shining strip of
near-deserted castaway shore.
The beaches at Lossiemouth, Burghead and Buckie are special, and they make a
stunning climax to a holiday journey along Strathspey, the valley that
carves down out of the Grampians to the sea. This is whisky country, salmon
country, shortbread country... so it’s pretty Scottish, then. People mostly
come to drink malt and fiddle with their flies, but there is so much more
here: wildlife festivals and Highland games, pony-trekking and castles,
reindeer and clay pigeons, cross-country skiing and golf.
Speyside central is the town of Aberlour, where the river slides beneath the
eye-catching iced-bun bulk of Ben Rinnes. Here you’ll find the so-called
Whisky Triangle — 18 distilleries inside a 10-mile radius
(www.maltwhiskytrail.com) — as well as shortbread baked to a
century-old recipe (www.walkersshortbread.com), salmon-fishing permits
(www.fishspey.co.uk) and some rather fine caber-tossing (this year on August
4). Just upriver is Ballindalloch Castle (www.ballindallochcastle.co.uk) —
500 years old, still lived in by its laird, and about as fanciful as
Scottish architecture gets.
But you’ll find the spirit of the valley, and its best hotel, on the Glenlivet
Crown Estate (www.glenlivetestate.co.uk), its 90 square miles of glens and
bens woven in tartan shades of purple and green. This is activity central,
with mountain-biking, 4WD and orienteering. Then there’s the 84-mile
Speyside Way (www.speysideway.org), which strides off down the valley and
all the way back to the sea. If you get lost, just ask for Denise’s Beach.
Digs and dinners: Minmore House (01807 590378,
www.minmorehousehotel.com; doubles from £128, B&B) is an elegant
mansion in jaw-dropping Glenlivet scenery, with friendly owners, chickens in
the yard and stunning afternoon teas. Much nearer the ocean, Westfield House
(01343 547308; doubles from £80, B&B), at Elgin, is inviting and
vaguely baronial.
THE BLACKWATER ESTUARY
It may be Essex, but instead of disco balls and white stilettos, think orange
sun suspended over glassy water and swans waltzing serenely in the shallows.
This is a backwater in the nicest possible sense — a place of sail lofts,
sea walls and Dutch barges, where lonesome villages dissolve away into the
eastern horizon. It all has a real edge-of-the-world feeling.
Your starting point is medieval Maldon, a rewarding little port anchored by
its flint and stone church towers and brisk quaysides. It’s the best place
anywhere to sniff the salty atmosphere of the old Thames water traffic:
Hythe Quay has a fleet of antique barges, their oxblood sails cutting a dash
on the water. You can charter your own from Topsail (01621 857567,
www.top-sail.co.uk) or take a day cruise along the estuary — some are guided
by expert bird-watchers or historians.
The big Blackwater treat, though, is the villages marooned in the salt
marshes: Tolleshunt D’Arcy and Goldhanger to the north, with their Edwardian
sail lofts and weatherboard cottages, many with boats instead of BMWs parked
outside; and, south of the estuary, the long Roman road to Bradwell, where
barn-like St Peter-on-the-Wall might be England’s eeriest chapel, intact
since AD654. Its summer Sunday services could convert even a heathen like me.
Digs and dinners: village B&B is the way to stay here.
Wicks Manor (01621 860629, www.wicksmanor.co.uk; doubles from £48), at
Tolleshunt Major, is a 17th-century moated farmhouse; New Moor Farm (01621
772840, www.newmoorfarm.com; doubles from £50), at Southminster, is great,
too. Or, in Maldon, the medieval Blue Boar (01621 855888,
www.blueboarmaldon.co.uk; doubles £85) has decent food, Sunday jazz and an
auction-sized collection of knickknacks and gewgaws. Don’t miss the
sublimely simple shellfish platters at the Company Shed (01206 382700) on
Mersea Island.
THE CLWYDIAN HILLS
Once upon a time, the Clwydian Hills were important. You can tell because they
are scattered with the flotsam of red-blooded frontier history. In the
eighth century, King Offa ran his dyke along them; 500 years later, Edward I
forged his “Iron Ring” of fortresses beneath their flanks, at Ruthin,
Denbigh and Rhuddlan, to suppress the revolting Welsh. Today, though, those
castles crumble and weekenders zip along the A55 towards Snowdonia,
splitting the hills without a second thought.
More fool them. This 20-mile range is itself a rampart, a neat row of
soft-shouldered summits offering mountainous views for minimal effort. Its
slopes, spiked with Iron Age hill forts and shagpiled in bilberry and
heather, glow lurid pink-purple as August turns to September; and the walker
patrolling the ridge from Loggerheads, or the mountain-biker pedalling from
Llandegla, can scoop up Snowdon, the Irish Sea and the Cheshire Plain in a
single spin.
Underneath the hills, day-trip musts include romantic Denbigh and cute St
Asaph, the titchiest cathedral in Britain. But the standout base is Ruthin,
a tidy market town with a murky past and an exclusive feel. Bits of its red
castle survive, and it has shops with fascias that still match the folks
behind the counter. The new, artist-designed Manorhaus restaurant-with-rooms
is proof that Ruthin is rapidly catching on among discerning visitors.
And to prove how civilised things are here, there is world-class art at
Bodelwyddan Castle (www.bodelwyddan-castle.co.uk), stronghold of the
National Portrait Gallery in Wales; and serious drama and dance at Theatr
Clwyd (www.clwyd-theatr-cymru.co.uk) in Mold — though beware the foyer, with
its full-frontal panorama of the hills. You may never make it into the
auditorium.
Digs and dinners: Manorhaus (01824 704830, www.manorhaus.com;
doubles from £85) has boutique bedrooms, its own art gallery and a
restaurant serving Welsh black beef and Menai mussels. Golden Grove (01745
854452; doubles £90), in Llanasa, is a grand Elizabethan B&B, while
the Druid Inn (01352 810225, www.druidinn.com; doubles from £65, B&B),
at Llanferres, is gorgeously positioned and does hefty food.
