Kingham

Kingham was once voted England's favourite village, by a Country Life panel in 2004, and it has spent the years since being comfortable about it. It sits in the Evenlode valley on the Oxfordshire edge of the Cotswolds, a green with the church of St Andrew above it, two good pubs in the Plough and the Wild Rabbit, and a railway station a little way out that puts London ninety minutes down the line.

That last fact has shaped the place more than the wool trade ever did. Kingham is where a certain kind of Londoner keeps a second house, and the Friday trains bring them out with the week still on them. Just up the road is Daylesford, which is the other reason the cars carry number plates from everywhere.

It is a prosperous, easy, well-kept village rather than a museum of one. The crowds that mob Bibury never really arrive here.

What goes on behind the converted barns and the long gravel drives is, as ever in this country, nobody's business but the people inside them. Kingham keeps its weekends to itself.