by Therefore, the government plans to concrete the Home Counties, including the Green Belt, to solve the housing crisis.
Buckinghamshire, already hit by HS2, appears to be the county most at risk. Perhaps now is the time to enjoy the beautiful Chilterns countryside, historic villages and country houses of rural South Bucks.
James Bond fans will already be familiar with some of Buckinghamshire’s more picturesque locations due to its proximity to Pinewood Studios in Iver Heath, where all Bond films have been filmed since Dr. No in 1962.
The most famous golf game in film history between Sean Connery’s Bond and Gert Frobes Goldfinger The 1964 film of the same name was filmed at Stoke Park, Britain’s first country club, five miles northwest of Pinewood. The clubhouse, a Palladian mansion designed by James Wyatt in 1788, was built for John Penn, grandson of William Penn, with proceeds from the sale of Pennsylvania to the U.S. government.
The churchyard of the beautiful old Norman church of St Giles on the edge of the park can be seen in the pre-title sequence of the 1981 Bond film For your eyes only as Bond, played by Roger Moore, places flowers on his wife Tracy’s grave before being flown away in a helicopter.
In the same churchyard in 1750, Thomas Gray sat under a yew tree and wrote his work Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. One can only hope that once the concrete has solidified, there will still be a line over which the roaring herd can slowly wriggle away, and that there will be fields from which the plowman can begin his weary journey home.
The yew tree is still there, as is Gray himself, buried next to his mother. While St Giles is full of beautiful things, one unique treasure is a fragment of glass in the west window, dated 1643, depicting a naked man blowing a trumpet while riding an early bicycle called a Hobbyhorse, the first known illustration of a bicycle in of the world.
A few miles north, in a quiet valley deep in the Chilterns, the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, lies beneath a simple tombstone in the garden of the beautiful old Quaker Meeting House at Jordans, built in 1688. Nearby is the 17th House The 19th-century Mayflower Barn is said to have been built from wood from the Mayflower barn that brought the Pilgrim Fathers to America in 1620.
In the delightful neighboring village of Chalfont St Giles is Milton’s Cottage, the last home of the poet John Milton, now a museum in his memory. He came here in 1665 to escape the plague and complete his epic The lost paradiseto write about the fall of mankind and later Paradise regained.
Thomas Jefferson was heavily influenced by Milton’s work when he wrote the American Declaration of Independence, and in 1887 Queen Victoria was persuaded to donate to a fund to prevent the cottage from being moved to America.
Beaconsfield is a beautiful old town of 17th century Georgian coaching inns and cottages with a Victorian New Town, home to the world’s first and oldest model village, Bekonscot, which opened in 1929 and inspired Noddy’s Toytown – Enid Blyton lived in Beaconsfield. The statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke is buried in the parish church, while GK Chesterton, who wrote the Father Brown stories while living in Beaconsfield, is buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery.
On the other side of High Wycombe lies the picturesque village of West Wycombe, owned by the National Trust. West Wycombe Park, which was expanded in the 18th century as a weekend retreat for Sir Francis Dashwood, is famous for its spectacular colonnaded south facade and has appeared in numerous television programs and films including A Clockwork Orange, Sense and sensuality, Howard’s End, Downton Abbey And The crown.
A nearby hill overlooks the park with the Dashwood Mausoleum and St. Lawrence Church, whose tower consists of the 14 profane ears of the world below.
In fact, obscenities and worse regularly occurred in caves dug into the chalk below the church, as this was where the infamous Hellfire Club met to indulge in bacchanalian orgies with ladies of “cheerful and lively disposition.” Today the caves are open as a tourist attraction.
Up the road, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Center attracts visitors from all over the world to the historic village of Great Missenden, where Dahl lived in a cottage called Gipsy House. Inspired by a visit to Dylan Thomas’s writing cabin in Laugharne, Wales, Dahl built his own writing cabin in the garden of the Gypsy House, where he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and The BFG. The hut was moved to the museum in 2011.
In the nearby village of Great Hampden is Hampden House, home of the “Great Patriot” John Hampden, whose refusal to pay Charles I’s “ship money” sparked the English Civil War. Farmers beware. A monument on the site marks the spot where he refused to pay. The house was remodeled in 1750 in a somewhat dark Gothic style, which was much appreciated by Hammer Films, who used it regularly as the Hammer House of Horror in the 1980s. Today it is a wedding venue.
Nearby, just outside the village of Ellesbrough, is Checkers, the beautiful 16th-century manor house that Viscount Lee gave to the nation in 1921 as a Prime Minister’s country retreat and which many say is the only good reason to become Prime Minister.
Not far from here is Lacey Green, home to England’s oldest surviving smock mill, dating from 1650, while south of the M40, Cobstone Windmill, overlooking the ancient village of Turville, was the home of the film’s inventor Caractacus Potts Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Turville itself, with its picturesque village green, 12th century church and pretty flint houses, is the setting for The Vicar of Dibley.
Next door, the small, unspoiled village of Fingest, where medieval and Georgian cottages cluster around the Norman church with its unique double-vaulted roof, is another model Chiltern village, as is Hambleden, with its Elizabethan manor house, birthplace of the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the ill-fated attack by the Light Brigade. The historic, much-photographed Hambleden Watermill down by the Thames has been described as “the most beautiful place in the whole of the long Thames Valley”.
Down the river, above beautiful beech forests behind the pretty town of Marlow, where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, lies Cliveden, an Italianate manor house built in 1851 by Charles Barry. In 1961, Secretary of State for War John Profumo met model Christine Keeler at Cliveden swimming pool and began an affair that eventually brought down Harold Macmillan’s government. The Cliveden site is now owned by the National Trust and is open to the public, while the house is leased by the Trust as a five-star hotel.
A county full of treasures that will soon be covered in concrete. Oh well. Joni Mitchell was right. “Isn’t it always the case that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone?”
Check out our pick of the best hotels in Buckinghamshire.
