Bibury

William Morris called Bibury the most beautiful village in England, and the coaches have been arriving to check ever since. They photograph the weavers' cottages at Arlington Row, feed the trout in the Coln, and are gone by tea. The row is older than it looks. It was built around 1380 as a wool store and converted into weavers' cottages three centuries later; the cloth they wove was dried on the racks of the island meadow across the water, which is still called Rack Isle. The National Trust keeps the row now, and you have very likely seen it without knowing where it was, since for years it sat inside the British passport.

St Mary's, set back from the river, is older still, Saxon under its later additions. The trout farm down the lane has raised fish since 1902. These are the things the day comes for, and they are worth coming for.

The village they photograph is real, and only the surface of the place. The lanes out of Bibury run quickly into high-walled country: gravel forecourts behind beech hedges, houses the colour of old biscuit that appear on no tour. A Jacobean front glimpsed once from a gateway, and then the gate again.

This is the Cotswolds the weekend does not see, the addresses that keep their own counsel, where the interesting dinners are never the ones written up. Bibury is the postcard. What it stands in front of is the point.