There's something disconcerting, almost unnerving, about turning off the A404, the main road I have followed a hundred times before - it links the M40 and M4, and is an invaluable way of avoiding one of the most inner circle of the damned chunks of the M25 - to drive over the brow of a hill and down into the Buckinghamshire village of Hambleden.
It's that eerie feeling of a completely unfamiliar place, which is nevertheless half remembered: walking from the car park by the cricket pitch, past the Stag and Huntsman pub and the lych gate of the lovely Norman church, turning left to the village hall just short of the general stores and post office, I felt a prickle of unease.
It's partly because so much of it really is half remembered, from all the movie and television directors who have descended on a genuinely chocolate box village, just 45 minutes from London.
Part of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was filmed here (Professor Caractacus Potts' windmill was a few valleys away, in Turville), it represented more innocent days of conkers and catapults in the BBC's version of Just William, and symbolised England in Band Of Brothers and Soldier Soldier. Passions simmered and boiled over in the bluebell-filled churchyard in Joanna Trollope's A Village Affair, while the minute village green was left scattered with corpses in The New Avengers and Midsomer Murders.
But the village, with its absurdly fat pheasants waddling through the lanes, and apple blossom blowing in the wind, was stirring older memories in me.
Last week's list of the nation's 100 best loved books, published by the BBC, was much mocked for its shelves of children's classics, wistful evocations of an England that never was, a land of green fields and rolling hills, and villages of low eaves, little windows, cottage gardens, small shops, cosy pubs.
Here are Ratty and Mole, coming down from a wooded hill, cold on a winter's night, passing a village, a huddle of cottages around a church, post office and pub, in The Wind In The Willows. "Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without... Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log."
As a child in Ireland, where villages are a straggle of houses along two sides of a road until both run out of energy, and most rural housing is brand-new bungalows scattered like flung pebbles across stony fields, my image of England was heavily shaped by The Wind In The Willows.
Where we had bog and gorse, nettles and brambles, they seemed to have fields as soft as hearth rugs, which a child or a small animal could roll down without being stabbed to the vitals by savage thistles. Our nearest streams were up in the Dublin mountains, bog water dark as tea without milk, not remotely like Kenneth Grahame's chalk streams babbling over bright pebbles. Our woods were newly planted state conifer forests, fenced off with barbed wire, as if any sane person would want to walk on the dead brown matting between the regimented black rows.
So walking down into Hambleden was the shock of encountering something utterly alien and completely familiar. The cottages do have gardens with apple trees and roses and aquilegia, and there was a ginger cat sitting on a sunny window sill. The brook is shallow and it does babble, as it runs, glittering, over chalk and flint through fields as green as billiard baize.
The woods - beech, with some mighty oaks, and enough glades and clearings for wild flowers to flourish - start just at the edge of the houses, and climb up to the hill crests that close out the real world. The foresters bring down logs for the pub's winter fires, and the shop sells superb game sausages from the estate.
Nothing so apparently artlessly perfect survives without an enormous amount of work. The village has consciously been preserved as a rich man's fantasy of rural England, for well over a century.
There was nothing remotely fey about WH Smith, a Victorian MP and hugely successful business man, whose chain of railway-station bookstalls prospered sufficiently to buy him one of the best shooting estates in England. He prospered sufficiently in business and politics to join the gentry, and took the name of his brand new ancestral estate, becoming Viscount Hambleden.
His grandson, the third Viscount, was far more romantically minded, and clearly realised how fragile a construct the village was. By then, the first world war had snatched the heart out of rural England, and industry and housing were on the march to fill the gaps. The memorial in the village hall reminds us that the very small village had lost a dozen young men from the fields and woods, three from one family, two each from two more.
Smith built new housing to keep young families in the village, and at the same time entered into a highly unusual covenant with the National Trust to preserve the outward appearance of all the buildings. The butcher and the baker have gone - but the houses, faithful to the covenant, still carry their trade signs.
The estate continued to be managed along resolutely traditional lines until a fortnight ago, when the villagers woke up and found that the Hon WH Smith - Henry, when pulling pints behind the bar of the pub - had concluded that paradise had a price: £16.5m if anyone wants the lot, more if it's broken up into individual lots.
The pub and the shop, the cottage gardens and the allotments, the garage where, surprisingly, a yellow Toyota was up on the hoist instead of Mr Toad's glittering red car, are not priceless after all: all have been valued and set down on a list. Down a narrow lane and across a minute bridge, there's a little oblong of land: the drying ground, traditionally enjoyed by two cottages with gardens so tiny there's no space to hang out bed sheets. At £20,000, they may have to invest in a tumble dryer instead.
You might feel you need an excuse to visit, since the villagers are feeling a little bruised after the media invasion: I saw, in very Hambleden style, a woman say, "I'm so sorry my dear", before closing a cottage door and leaving the tabloid crew standing amid her foxgloves.
It so happens that there is the perfect excuse to visit this summer, a season of tea concerts in the lovely church of St Mary the Virgin - short concerts on June 1, 15, July 13 and 27, and August 17. Teas will be on sale afterwards and admission is free.
Do put something in the collection box, unlike another hack I observed, looking furtively around and then nicking a guidebook. I put some money in myself, to save her soul from eternal damnation.
Way to go
Getting there: By car: Take the A404 off the M40 towards Marlow, then the A4155 towards Henley on Thames. By train: Henley on Thames station is five miles from the village of Hambleden. National Rail Enquiries (08457 484950, nationalrail.co.uk).
Where to stay: The Stag and Huntsman, Hambleden (01491 571 2270) has lunchtime and evening meals, and accommodation from £68 for an ensuite double on a B&B basis.
Further information: Henley on Thames Tourist Office (01491 578034).
