For my first and only holiday of the year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my Mum and I stayed at The Barleycorn Inn, a family-run pub and B&B in the village of Collingbourne Kingston in north Wiltshire. Famished upon arrival due to a delay on the road and enticed by the novelty of pizza served in a basket, which is how the Inn serves its mouthwatering pizzas, we ate what would be the first of 18 meals we would have at the Inn. Yes, that’s right, we would break the record for the longest stay ever at this A-roadside Inn with a 9-night stay. Uncharacteristic, but it would mean that we wouldn’t have to keep packing and sanitising our accommodation, that we would be easier to track and trace, and that in this barely populated village and far from a city we would be unlikely to be trapped in a lockdown.
Staying this long at an Inn meant that we could try most of the items on the menu, chat to newcomers to the village for which a stay at the Inn seems to be a rite of passage, and get to experience what the pub was like on different days, such as mornings when the chickens pecked by the picnic benches in the beer garden in anticipation of their breakfast, busy nights with chatter and music going well past supper time, quiet nights when we could eavesdrop the conversation between other diners, chilly nights when the log fire was lit, a vinyl night to which you can bring your own LPs, a birthday night when the antlers in the breakfast room was bedecked with balloons, and the first live music night (starring Josh) since lockdown.
Where I visited
15 minutes’ drive away is the market town of Marlborough, on the A road on which The Barleycorn Inn is also situated along. The drive into it is sigh evoking, covered by a canopy of trees as you pass on the western edge of Savernake Forest where King John, who gave the town its charter, used to hunt. We passed through this town on several occasions, so by the end of our stay I could probably name half of the shops on the High Street, which though it is the 2nd widest in the UK is not the longest. It was nice walking around the yards and by the river Kennet, and negotiating the nooks and crannies of the award-winning antiques shop The Cat’s Whiskers, which has objects tumbling down the walls of its winding stairwell.
Many famous people have lived and worked in Marlborough, including William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, and Cardinal Wolsey, who was first ordained in St. Peter’s Church at the west end of the High Street. However, the most impressive thing I saw was not the High Street or the buildings that once housed great people but Marlborough College, one of the most expensive public (that is to say prestigious and private) schools in Britain, where the Duchess of Cambridge was a pupil, and where Merlin is said to have been buried in what is actually a Norman motte where Marlborough Castle, which would have hosted King John, once stood.
North Wiltshire is famous for its ham, henges and stone circles, but, as I came to discover, is also where:
- the Best of British food is to be found, at The Barleycorn Inn in Collingbourne Kingston if you’re looking for affordable and delicious pub food, at The Bell Inn in Ramsbury which was the Pub of the Year 2017/2018, and at the Michelin-starred Manor Hotel & Golf Club in Castle Combe if you want to splash out.
- there are warning signs for cars about possible encounters with a sight as cute as ducks and ducklings and a sight as menacing as tanks.
- the army trains, on Salisbury Plain. On our Stonehenge Landscape walk we followed the path of an old military railway.
- haystacks come in shapes which I call “the Swiss roll”, “the brownie stack”, and “the chocolate bar”.
- geese and chickens are truly free-range and can be spotted by an A-road.
- chippies seem to be run by families with Chinese-sounding names – Yeung’s in Marlborough, Lee’s in Devizes, Tong’s in Corsham.
- Truro in the 2015 BBC adaptation of Poldark can be found. Filming took place in Corsham, chosen instead of the actual city of Truro in Cornwall because it has one of the best preserved High Streets in Wiltshire. My Mum and I are fans of the Poldark books and the first season of the 2015 series, and had already visited one of the filming locations in Cornwall.
- the longest continuous flight of locks in England are at Caen Hill in Devizes. On our walk to the Caen Hill flight and back we saw a buzzard flying overhead, a heron and two swans in one of the side ponds, a narrowboat personified by tennis ball eyes, a messy narrowboat that used a toilet bowl as a plant pot, a narrowboat sarcastically named The Big Apple, where “Big” was in superscript and only visible up close, people letting the water in and out – which they needed their own spanner for – and opening and closing the gates of the locks, the owner of Chief Cornstalk operating the locks single-handedly, a caretaker oiling the lock mechanism, and boaters fishing to pass the time.
Within 2 hours’ drive are the counties of Hampshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire, and we didn’t confine ourselves to places in Wiltshire. Hampshire we had visited over Easter in 2017 when we stayed in Winchester. In Somerset we visited Frome, which was rated by The Sunday Times as the best place to live in the UK in 2019 and had the most interesting shopping street of all the places we went to, and Cheddar Gorge, England’s largest gorge, where feral goats roam and where Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton was found. From the viewpoint overlooking the gorge, despite the overcast sky, we spied Glastonbury Tor, where King Arthur is said to have been buried. To get to the viewpoint you have to climb over a wall that made me think of the one in Stardust. In Gloucestershire we visited Bourton-on-the-Water, which is named “Venice of the Cotswolds” for the five stone bridges that cross the river Windrush that runs through the village. We walked along the Windrush Way and the Wardens Way to the next village along to escape the crowds. At Lower Slaughter, winner of the best kept village of 2005, our turning round point was the mill on the river Eye, along which a rider and horse clip-clopped.
The benefits of having a small car was never so clear to me until this trip. Many people who make road trips drive in large 4x4s, and they can’t fit into the only parking spaces left when you arrive at the UK’s most popular landmarks – Cheddar Gorge, Bourton-on-the-Water – in the late morning or at midday. At Cheddar Gorge, there were lots of police. When you see how few the parking spaces are the closer you get to the village centre of Cheddar and how dangerous it can be to drive aggressively in the narrow confines of a gorge you can see why.
Read the National Trust walking guide before you embark. Not doing so left me at a standstill halfway up a muddy and slippery track that led to the viewpoint over Cheddar Gorge, trying to summon up the courage to make it to the cave where there was flat ground and I could rest my beating heart. I was very insensibly wearing white trousers and old Skechers shoes that were so worn the soles were smooth. And if I had read the walking guide I would have known that it would be this steep and that there was an alternative path through the woods. Luckily, my Mum found some walking sticks amid the leaves, my trousers stayed white, and my ankle un-sprained.
Read the steps in the National Trust guide to determine whether you can handle the terrain. “Challenging” is not always the case, as with the West Kennet Round walk we completed in Avebury – it was challenging neither in terrain, which was gently rolling, nor in orientation, as long as you stay focused, nor in its length, at 6.5 miles (10.4 km). In comparison, the Cheddar Gorge walk that was impossible to return on without falling over was “moderate”. Reading the steps will inform you of the challenges ahead.
Henges need a lot of imagination to bring to life, except for Stonehenge, which is what makes it special I guess. The stone henge at Avebury is larger and older than Stonehenge, but only a few remnants remain as the stone was broken up for masonry over the ages. Henges don’t necessarily contain stones – we walked round Woodhenge and The Sanctuary, both wood henges where concrete now marks the spots where timber posts used to stand – and are at their simplest earthworks consisting of raised banks around flat ground. Barrows, on the other hand, can be easily spotted without aerial photography. They cover a smaller surface area, and therefore protrude from the ground more prominently, and often contain a rock tomb or are topped with beech trees.
Do you believe in fate? Throughout my holiday there were moments when it felt as if I were destined to travel here, in this year, at this time in my life. In Marlborough I came across the old home of a fellow Brasenostril – alumnus of Brasenose College – William Golding, and staying in Room 1 opposite us at the Inn one night was a fellow Classics graduate, from Corpus Christi, Oxford. In Devizes, the final lock at the bottom of the Caen Hill flight before you enter Rowde is numbered 28, which is what I will turn come November. In West Kennet Long Barrow, tired from the long walk that we had embarked on that led us here, I stumbled upon a group of pagans and was invited to join in their ritual over a cup of mead, and was marked with a rune to give me the strength of the auroch to carry me through the day.
Our road trip began and ended with barley corn. For on the way back we pulled into a maize field off the highway in Sompting in West Sussex to eat the Wiltshire ham and fresh tomato sandwiches that our host at The Barleycorn Inn had kindly packed (off-menu) for us. There we spent some time finding the 9 signs in the Maize Maze (which is really for children but hey, it’s better than a gas station), and picked an ear of corn each.
Where I ate and drank
Apart from at The Barleycorn Inn every breakfast and supper, I tried:
Bite Me Burger – a burger and chicken joint in Marlborough where burgers come in mini sizes and cost £4 each. The sauce of the Blood Mary burger is scrummy and the decor is funky: an electric fireplace with burgers instead of logs, burger cushions, and salad walls.
The Polly Tea Rooms – a tearoom in Marlborough that’s ranked 15th in The Sunday Telegraph’s top 30 places in the UK for afternoon tea, No. 1 in the South West of the UK. We only stopped there because it had outdoor seating and a toilet, but found that the staff are really friendly and returned. You know it’s a real tearoom when they ask you how you take your tea.
Markets – Wednesday and Saturdays are market days in Marlborough, when you can buy local farm produce and specialities like the lardy cake, which is made with leftover fat from the famous Wiltshire pigs.
Waitrose – if you can’t find a Marlborough bun at the market, you can buy them from the fresh bakery unit in Waitrose.
Cheddar – if you want ready to eat Cheddar for a picnic, there are cubes of them, mature and filling, for you to buy from the Original Cheddar Cheese Company, a cheese merchant, not producer. If you want to buy “the only Cheddar made in Cheddar” direct from the producer, queue up at The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company. The crumbly and nutty cave-aged Cheddar is my favourite, far superior I think to the herbs and garlic Cheddar which is completely smooth and the extra strong Cheddar the taste of which approaches blue cheese. You can also visit the Visitor Centre and watch the cheese being made from the viewing gallery.
Flavoursome ales – if, like me, you like strong, flavoursome ales, you’ll like the Flint Knapper from the Ramsbury Estate and the 6X (named “six X”, not “six times”), the signature brew from the Wadworth Brewery in Devizes. Visit the Wadworth Brewery on a weekday not in the first half of August and not in a pandemic and you’ll see their famous Shire horses delivering their beer to the nearby Inns within the 2 mile radius of the brewery! Wadworth is one of the last remaining breweries to use Shire horses to deliver, and they do so once per day.
The Flemish Weaver – this pub in Corsham has lots of booths both indoors and outdoors (how COVID ready), Poldark cushions, and the largest selection of ales in any of the pubs I drank at.
The White Bear Inn – the oldest pub in Devizes, which has a polar bear Inn sign and had stuck a witty laminated stock photo of a polar bear at the entrance with the words
The average female polar bear is 1.9 meters in length... Stay Safe Stay Alert And Think Polar Bear
Where I stayed
The Barleycorn Inn – I booked because I thought The Barleycorn Inn would be clean and safe (it had a cleanliness rating of 8.9 on Booking.com), because of its location within 2 hours’ drive of everywhere we wanted to visit, because it was not in a place that might fall in a lockdown zone, because it had free onsite parking, because it was good value (£70 per night for a twin room), and because it was home to chickens, which I discovered live in the beer garden, lay wherever they fancy, and climb trees!
The thing I liked most about my stay was the hospitality and the food. Everyone we met during our stay was super friendly, and the food – in particular the full English breakfast and the pizzas – was the best I’d ever eaten at that price in a British pub. They buy their ham, bacon and sausages from Sandridge Farm in Devizes, and take great care in preparing them for the table. Through Ness’ breakfasts I found that after a lifetime of dislike I did in fact like black pudding (apparently the secret is that they’re Scottish, not English), Andy taught me how to play my first vinyl, and Eliot lent me his personal umbrella which saved both of us from being soaked on a rainy day when raincoats and the single umbrella propped outside our door to borrow was not enough.
We also liked the big bathroom with strong water pressure and underfloor heating, which made washing our facemarks and sanitising after a long day out easy and enjoyable. Finally, we liked the fact that our room (Room 2) overlooked our car, which was good for security and for unloading the car and passing our belongings through the window and into our room. The only thing we felt lacking was a strong and consistent Wifi (I had brought my laptop to work from in case I was stuck here in a lockdown), and a TV that was larger than the painting in the room (though it’s not the smallest we’ve encountered on our holidays!).
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