I reached the age of 36 without ever owning a car. It is one of the reasons I find driving so romantic. I have never wasted precious evenings stuck in commuter traffic, my windscreen fogging with boredom. I have never noticed the outrageous price of petrol. My week has never been thrown into chaos by the sudden blinking of a warning light on the dashboard, followed by the apologetic cough of a failing starter motor.
Earlier this year, I took the plunge. I wanted to explore the British countryside – in style – so I bought my first car, a 1972 MGB soft-top, with a bright blue finish and a sexy growl. My popularity among my friends suddenly soared.
For our first adventure, I wanted a road trip that was worthy of my romanticism – one that combined rural charm with a spike of old-school glamour. I’m an utter sucker for a country house – the first thing I bought for the car was a National Trust sticker – and I had dreams of sweeping up a carriageway to a grand portico-ed entrance, emerging in a floor-length dress and handing the keys to a waiting footman.
Living in the south-east, I’ve always enjoyed the Cotswolds as a place to slip into a fantasy of life as it used to be lived. Just beyond them, however, is an area I’ve never explored at all: the western Midlands between Worcestershire and Shropshire, skirting the fringes of Birmingham, promises hill ranges, nature reserves, and long country drives punctuated with picturesque villages. Instead of the better-known Cotswolds destinations of Stow-in-the-Wold and Chipping Norton, it offers the equally quaintly named Bobbington, Stoke Bliss and Quatt.
This section of map, whose sole claim to urban fame is the mighty Kidderminster, is also pleasingly dotted with symbols for stately homes and gardens, most of which I’ve never heard of but which, on closer investigation, offer a rich seam of history, from medieval abbeys to the Civil War, Georgian elegance and the industrial revolution. There are teashops, village pubs, and eggs to be bought from roadside stalls. It’s a hidden slice of quintessential England – without coach tours or honeypot prices.
It was while researching the area that I came across Capability Brown’s website. Not that the famous landscape gardener blogs there himself, of course – he’s been dead since 1783 – but he has left a legacy of more than 250 gardens, parks and pleasure grounds across the UK. Several of them are open to the public for the first time this year, as part of the 300th anniversary celebrations of his birth. There’s an even an interactive map to help with trip planning.
Live like a toff
The website helped me discover my dream destination: Weston Park, Shropshire. The 17th-century mansion – in 1,000 acres of parkland between Birmingham and Shrewsbury – positively encourages guests to indulge their aristo-fantasies. The main house, has 28 en suite bedrooms or the whole house can be hired – including multiple drawing rooms, banquet hall and collection of fine art and silver (from £215pp pn, meals included). I chose, instead, to stay in its Temple of Diana, the summerhouse built for Weston’s fifth baronet, Sir Henry Bridgeman, in the 1760s, and refurbished last year to create a classy holiday let sleeping six (from £1,051 for a three-night stay, ruralretreats.co.uk).
Shropshire’s proximity to Wales has always made me imagine a far-off place, but within 2½ hours of leaving London, I was approaching the neoclassical folly, dodging the estate’s free-roaming sheep. Curved doors set into circular walls led through a sequence of increasingly jaw-dropping interiors, from the muralled music room where Bridgeman’s wife and children took tea, up a spiral stone staircase straight out of Professor Dumbledore’s library, to three bedrooms, one of them circular.
The showstopper is the orangery, with pavilion-style glass walls and stucco ceiling. Some friends were joining me for the night, and I waited for them in quiet contemplation, as the sun set behind AE Housman’s blue remembered hills. The light across the serene, rolling landscape glowed corn yellow, then vibrant orange, the colours as solid as if they literally hung in the air.
By the time my friends arrived, a super moon had risen over the lake behind the building, and bats flitted across its surface. The Temple itself was the brightest spot in the grounds, beaming light and the promise of cocktail parties. We put on some Justin Bieber and danced wildly across the flagstones. It felt like the decadent thing to do.
Eat like a king
The Temple has a kitchen to die for, but there is also, for those who wish they had staff to handle that side of things, a restaurant and deli in Weston Park’s former Granary. The head chef, Guy Day, told us he was a huge fan of fresh and cured meats from Wenlock Edge Farm. He was excited, too, about Fish, a new fishmonger-cum-cafe in Bridgnorth. “Obviously, being landlocked, Shropshire hasn’t been known for its fish,” he smiled. If we decided to visit nearby Ironbridge, he said, we should look out for Eley’s pork pies , which can even be personalised
My friends departed for home – all but Alex, who, with one look at my car, shrugged off her day job and offered her services as navigator. Driving the B-roads around Weston we were caught out less by map-reading mishaps than by rural opening hours – or, more accurately, closing hours (Monday, especially, was not a good day to decide you want a pub lunch). Happily, the town of Shifnal had several pubs – including the dark-panelled, low-ceilinged Plough Inn , which was still serving.
Its high street had a mixture of unfailingly friendly businesses – coffee shops, bakers, grocers, a Balti house, and two of the most immaculately kept charity shops I’d ever seen. At Jackson’s of Shifnal, a cheery butcher named Graham tried to help as I stood, baffled, in front of a large range of pies. One of them, the “Big Fidget”, appealed precisely because it was what my mum used to call me when I was growing up.
“That’s a local recipe,” said Graham. “Ham, apple and onions.” We took one (it was delicious), along with some Shropshire Blue cheese, and eggs too big to fit in their boxes. I asked Graham where he was from. “Cound,” he said. It’s a village on the Severn about half an hour away. Should I check it out? “There’s nothing there but a handful of houses!” he laughed. “No, this is the nicest little town around: 12 miles from Wolverhampton, but it’s like you’re in a different world. We’ve got everything we need on our doorstep.”
Glamp it up
Heading south towards Worcester, the meandering country roads were well-suited to the low-slung, corner-hugging MGB – less so to Alex, who was convinced we were travelling far faster than our modest 50mph. We’d booked into a “glamping site” on the outskirts of town, and I was a little sceptical that a yurt just off the A449 would feel glamorous after Weston.
In the end, it wasn’t the yurts that grabbed our attention as much as the herd of cattle next door. Worcester Glamping (from £65 a night for two) is, it transpired, on a dairy farm, one that also specialises in ice cream (bennettsicecream.co.uk). This definitely seemed good news.
The yurt’s interior was more cosy than luxe, and the wood stove was easy to stoke, so we didn’t require the hot water bottles left thoughtfully on our beds. For dinner, our hosts recommended Cromwell’s, a Nepalese curry house up the road: “They’ll deliver, if you give them this address.” Camping had never seemed so simple. A mere half-hour later, Alex and I were sitting outdoors, drinking beers and tucking into chhate milan, a deep, dark mushroomy dish. It may not have been fine dining, but it felt pretty damn luxurious.
The next day, our hosts pointed out the footpath along the banks of the Severn. “You can walk from here right to Worcester cathedral, or go the other way to where it meets the Teme – it’s really pretty.” But fuelled by the flavours of Nepal, we decided to the nearest thing these parts have to the Himalayas. The Malvern hills, 20 minutes out of Worcester, make for a great walk – and an even better drive, since there are car parks halfway up Worcestershire Beacon that help you avoid the hard schlep.
Anyway, you don’t need to have “earned” the view to appreciate the drama of the Malvern ridge. There was a moment, near the top of the beacon, where our line of sight was completely obscured by the long green ridge ahead. Then one footstep higher, our eyes were suddenly flooded with the green patchwork of three counties (Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire), and a vista that stretched to the Welsh border and beyond.
Get into gardens
If the Malverns are a dream of England, they are one that Lancelot “Capability” Brown spent his life attempting to make into reality. Croome, the Earl of Coventry’s country estate, was Brown’s first independent commission, and one of the best examples of his work in the region.
It seemed the perfect end to a trip that had been spent in pursuit of the life beautiful. The patch of the west Midlands where Shropshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire meet has a profusion of fascinating historic houses and gardens: after Weston Park, we had flexed our National Trust passes first at Wightwick Manor, an arts and crafts home owned by a wealthy industrialist and filled with William Morris fabrics and wallpapers, and then at Dudmaston Hall, a wooded, medieval estate transformed, in the latter half of the 18th century, by the new yen for landscape gardening. The “Dingle”, an artfully constructed valley, with winding paths, brooks and bridges, remains as romantic today as a Jane Austen heroine could have wished.
But Croome was fiction on a different scale. Brown drained the water from its boggy land to create a lake vast enough to boat on; he hid the house’s Jacobean brick behind a Palladian facade; he built ha-has to create the illusion of open parkland; and he even dismantled and moved an entire village to make for a better vista.
As we walked slowly around his “pleasure grounds”, along sinuous paths, past tranquil bodies of water, Brown’s brilliant eye was in evidence everywhere. Oaks and cedars of Lebanon planted by him still stand, colouring the landscape with contrast. Follies drew our eyes to the horizon. “The house doesn’t have a bad angle,” observed Alex, as we came across yet another brilliantly conceived viewpoint, and bathed in the glow from its Bath stone.
A monument to Brown – placed near a grotto he’d created for imaginary nymphs to live in – remembers a man “who by the power of his inimitable and creative genius, formed this garden out of a morass”. Fifty miles away, his grandest and most famous work, at Blenheim Palace, is visited by hundreds every day. Here at Croome, it was easier to believe, as we stood and gazed, that it was all designed just for our benefit.
