Downham

Downham looks the way English villages look in the imagination, and it is no accident. The Assheton family have held the manor since 1558, and the estate quietly forbids the clutter of the modern age: no television aerials or satellite dishes, no overhead wires, no road signs — services are cabled underground to keep the view clean. The result is a stone village tumbling down to its brook, ducks on the water, the church at the top and the great whale-back of Pendle Hill filling the sky behind. Film-makers have borrowed it for decades, from Whistle Down the Wind onwards, yet on a weekday morning you can have it almost to yourself.

A village kept deliberately timeless by five centuries of single-family stewardship, in countryside the crowds drive past on their way to the Lakes — the detour pays instantly.

• Peace & Quiet
• Photographers
• Walkers
• Hidden Gem