REVIEWS

And so, recently, my wife and I made our way to Much Wenlock to stay at The Raven. You can have your Shaftesburys and Burfords, your Ledburys and Chipping Sodburys. For me, this small, half-timbered, red-brick, lobelia-hung, narrow-streeted, alleywayed, book-and-tea-shopped town, with its Elizabethan guildhall, is the supreme delight of urban-pastoral Britain. It seems entirely at ease in its own antiquity, unbuffed and uninterpreted, the soft burr of the Marches the inflection on its streets.

As for our comfortable little hotel and the quality of its table.... think of the dawning astonishment and delight on the face of the General in Babette’s Feast (the greatest food film, and one of the loveliest hymns to life’s riches, ever made). Thus my wife and myself, over every mouthful of unfussy perfection.

If your taste is more for “bare, ruin’d choirs” than gastronomic surprise, walk down a dingle from Wenlock’s parish church and you come across one of the great monastic remains in Britain. Best preserved of all our Cluniac houses, St Milburgha’s Priory is vast in its ground plan, majestic in its remnant Early English and Norman architecture, peerless in the sweet, gardened intimacy of its surroundings.

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