In Wiltshire, in the Cotswolds Area, there is a tiny, sweet village called Castle Combe. Despite its name, it has no castle, but visiting it, I couldn’t help but think that the villagers living there (last count: 326) wished they had a fortress and moat to keep out the visitors.
It was past six in the evening. The summer sun was still shining bright, lighting up the surrounding forests with its golden rays. Birds were chirping, leaves were rustling, and in the distance, I heard dogs barking.
We had parked our car some distance away from the village, heeding one of a long string of visitor tips issued by Visit Wiltshire: don’t drive into the lower village; walk the 10 minutes down the hill to the cottages and bridge; coaches and large groups must stick to the main car park and stay out of the village centre. The rules alone tell you something about the volume of people this place has learned to manage.
Walk into the village, don’t drive into it – is one of the visitor tips from Visit Wiltshire.
The walk is genuinely beautiful, and it opens up to the “wow” moment when you first lay eyes on Castle Combe, once voted England’s most beautiful village. Roughly 150,000 people visit the village every year, and in the peak summer months, the tension between visitors and residents flares up and gets written about in the local papers, in headlines like “UK’s ‘most beautiful’ village locals fume over intrusive tourists” and “Furious villagers say community is being ruined by tourists.”
The village square at Castle Combe, a popular gathering spot for visitors. In the peak summer months, the tension between visitors and residents flares up.
In the village square, tourists sat around the fountain, chattering loudly, taking photos – mostly of themselves. I wondered, not for the first time, why people travel to a spot this beautiful only to photograph their own faces in front of it. At the Castle Inn, people nursed pints and wine as the evening chatter grew louder with the setting sun.
I walked into the church, which was open, and past the houses, which were not – doors and windows shuttered, curtains drawn against the street. I had the distinct feeling that the people living inside wanted nothing to do with those of us outside. There have been stories of residents coming home to find tourists having tea in their gardens. No wonder everything’s shut up now.
Castle Combe is what happens when a place is loved past the point it can absorb it, and the fine balance between visitors and residents comes apart. It isn’t the only one in the Cotswolds – Bourton-on-the-Water and Bibury wear the same strain, hordes crowding the cafes at one, peering through the windows of the 14th-century cottages at Arlington Row at the other, prompting the National Trust to post a plea on its website: “Remember that the cottages on Arlington Row are homes. Please don’t knock on the doors or peer through the windows, disturbing people in their own home.”
Those are villages that have already been discovered. What I really wanted to see was one on its way to being discovered – and I didn’t have to look far.
The Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury, bought and now run by Whim Hospitality, which wants to transform this historic market town into a destination resort.
Venturing further north into Wiltshire, I headed to Malmesbury, a market town dating back to medieval times, to meet David Andrews, CEO of Visit Wiltshire, and Whit Hanks, a Texan from Austin who bought the oldest hotel in town – the Old Bell Hotel, dating to 1220 – five years ago, and is talking grand expansion plans.
Whit comes from a background in antiques and real estate. He and his wife, Kim, run Whim Hospitality, which operates the Old Bell as well as Camp Lucy, a “Hill Country haven and luxury resort and event venue” in Dripping Springs, Texas Wine Country.
The plan is to build something similar in Malmesbury: a destination resort, spa and wellness centre included. “Camp Lucy took off when we added a spa,” he told me, “and we believe the same will happen here.”
Whit Hanks: So far, he’s bought 15 properties in the town. “Camp Lucy took off when we added a spa and we believe the same will happen here.”
So far, he’s bought 15 properties in the town. A butcher shop – “because we had to have our own supply of meat”. Six townhouses, being converted into private apartments. And Abbey House Manor, which comes with its own story, as these old buildings tend to.
It dates to the 12th century, once part of the grounds of a Benedictine monastery where monks grew medicinal herbs. More recently, it was known for its “Naked Gardens”: owners Ian and Barbara Pollard famously gardened in the nude and, a few days a week, opened the grounds to fellow naturalists to do the same. The five-acre gardens are still lovely to walk through, though they haven’t been tended as carefully since the Pollards passed, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they looked rather naked without the gardeners in them — one eccentric, intensely local thing quietly absorbed into my traveller brain.
A hidden tomb in the Abbey House Manor grounds.
Whit, who’s as full of enthusiasm as he is with stories, walked us through the townhouses and the manor, laying out what he and his wife intend to build. “People either go wow, it’s going to be wonderful, or wow, they’re crazy, it’s going to be a money pit,” he said.
Me, looking at the state of the manor, cellars, kitchen, rooms, I think it’ll be a wonder if they finish what they’ve set out to build on the three-year timeline they’ve given themselves. But then, I’m not from Austin.
Which is when it struck me: if Castle Combe is what over-visited looks like, Malmesbury is what it looks like on the way there. A market town of somewhere between 6,300 and 7,600 residents is about to acquire its own spa, its own destination-resort marketing budget, and – if Camp Lucy’s Texas playbook holds – its own crowds.
The Naked Gardens at the Abbey Manor House – looking naked without the two gardeners who made them infamous.
The conversation with Whit was all about build, market and sell, not about visitor caps or car parks at the edge of town. Indeed, he wants to build a car park right within the grounds of the Manor but is facing some regulatory issues because of the dead and buried bodies they keep finding in the grounds.
But this, David Andrews told me, is exactly the load England’s Great West Way, an initiative of Visit Wiltshire, is meant to carry. “Think of Route 66 – it’s iconic, everyone wants to do it, but there isn’t actually a road or a route, it’s an idea,” he said. “Our idea is to tell people there’s a lot to do in the area between London and Bristol, and you can do this touring route, either by car, river or rail.”
The route stretches 500 miles of “navigable ancient pathways” between London and Bristol, as far as Oxford and the Cotswolds in the north, Stonehenge and Hampshire in the south – an invitation to discover Royal Windsor, Reading, Malmesbury and Bath by bike, boat, foot, rail or car. “Especially in the summer, we need to take the load off places like Castle Combe,” Andrews said, “and have people enjoy slow travel along this route and disperse them to other places.”
It’s a good idea, and a necessary one. But I left Wiltshire thinking about the gap between the two conversations I’d had that day – one about spreading tourists thin across 500 miles so no single village drowns in them, the other about concentrating a spa, a hotel group and 15 freshly acquired properties into one market town of a few thousand people.
Dispersal is the industry’s answer to Castle Combe. Destination-building is how you get the next one. Both were happening in the same county, on the same afternoon. Another eccentric, intensely local thing quietly absorbed into my traveller brain.
My next trip: slow travel on the Great West Way – and perhaps a return visit to Malmesbury to see if Whit realises his whim.
