Scenic Point in Wiltshire

Castle Combe in the Cotswolds of Wiltshire has been described on several occasions as the most beautiful village in England, a title it shares with several competitors but wears with some justification given the particular perfection of its combination of Cotswold stone buildings, the Bybrook stream running through the lower village and the complete absence of any intrusive modern development that might disturb the essentially medieval character of its streets and buildings. The village was used as a location for the filming of Doctor Dolittle in 1967 and various other productions since, and the absence of television aerials, satellite dishes and modern shop fronts from the main street reflects the village's commitment to maintaining its historic character. The village developed its prosperity during the medieval and Tudor periods as a cloth-making centre, and the wealth generated by the wool trade funded the building of the handsome Perpendicular Gothic church of St Andrew, the market cross and the stone-built cottages along the main street that create the streetscape for which Castle Combe is celebrated. The church contains memorials to the de Dunstanville family, who gave the village its name from the castle that stood above it in the Norman period, and to other local families who benefited from and contributed to the medieval prosperity of the settlement. The lower village, where the Bybrook flows between stone-built cottage gardens and beneath an ancient packhorse bridge, is the most picturesque section and provides the views most reproduced in Cotswold tourism literature. The combination of the stream, the bridge, the mill and the cottages in a narrow valley setting creates a scene of particular concentrated beauty that is most rewarding in the early morning before the visitor traffic of the day begins. The Castle Combe motor racing circuit, confusingly, is located at a considerable distance from the village and bears no visual relationship to the historic settlement.

Lacock in Wiltshire is one of the most completely preserved medieval and early modern villages in England, a National Trust village whose combination of the fourteenth-century Lacock Abbey, the medieval village street plan, the picturesque houses of various periods from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century and the significance of the abbey as the birthplace of photography creates a heritage destination of quite exceptional depth and historical breadth. The absence of pylons, telegraph poles and television aerials from the village makes it one of the most frequently used film locations in England for period productions. Lacock Abbey, founded in 1232 as an Augustinian nunnery and converted to a house following the Dissolution, was the home of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the positive-negative photographic process whose calotype method, developed at Lacock in the 1840s, established the fundamental principle of modern photography. The Fox Talbot Museum in the gate-house of the abbey traces the development of the photographic process from the earliest experiments at Lacock to the modern era. The village is entirely in the ownership of the National Trust and the complete control of the built fabric that this provides has allowed the preservation of a medieval street plan and a collection of buildings of many periods that together create one of the most comprehensive small historic settlement experiences available in England. The film productions that have used Lacock include Pride and Prejudice, Downton Abbey and numerous other period dramas.