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Country Look Britain’s independent guide to the places, people and experiences worth seeking out. Home of the Countrylook Awards. Established 2006.

Robin Hood’s Bay has never been short of smuggling stories, but one of its best involves neither a secret tunnel nor a s...
09/10/2026

Robin Hood’s Bay has never been short of smuggling stories, but one of its best involves neither a secret tunnel nor a ship arriving under cover of darkness. In 1886, an elderly sailor recalled how two local women set off for Whitby with bladders of gin or brandy concealed beneath their skirts. When a customs officer spotted them, one woman promptly sat down beside a hedge and began groaning. Her companion scolded the officer for his lack of concern and sent him to fetch a doctor. By the time he returned, the women had escaped with their precious cargo. Later that day, he encountered one of them in Whitby and asked whether she had been safely delivered. “Aye, Sir, down there by the quay,” she replied with a grin. It is a story that makes the Bay’s quiet little passageways seem rather less innocent than they first appear.

26/09/2026

What a beautiful moment

Arlington Row
25/09/2026

Arlington Row

The Isle of Mull by then amazing Nicola Turner
24/09/2026

The Isle of Mull by then amazing Nicola Turner

Grassington is known for limestone lanes, handsome stone houses and the quiet beauty of Grass Wood. Yet in the eighteent...
23/09/2026

Grassington is known for limestone lanes, handsome stone houses and the quiet beauty of Grass Wood. Yet in the eighteenth century, that woodland became the final stage of one of the darkest stories in the Yorkshire Dales.

According to the best-known version, in April 1766, village doctor Richard Petty disappeared after travelling home from a cockfight at Kettlewell. Suspicion fell on local man Tom Lee, who had reportedly accompanied him. Petty’s body was eventually recovered from the River Wharfe, but Lee was initially acquitted through lack of evidence.

Two years later, new testimony brought him back before the court. He was convicted of Petty’s murder and hanged at York in 1768. What happened afterwards is the part modern visitors may find hardest to imagine.

Lee’s body was returned to Grassington and suspended in iron chains from a tree near the murder site in Grass Wood. This was known as gibbeting: the public display of an executed criminal’s co**se, intended to deny an honourable burial and provide a lasting warning to others. Local accounts claim that Lee remained there for years as his body slowly decayed above the path.

History then gives way to folklore. Pieces of clothing, and perhaps even parts of the body, were supposedly taken as charms. Lee’s gibbet irons, possibly accompanied by his bones, were later said to have been thrown into a deep stretch of the Wharfe. His ghost was reported in the woods, while a nearby pool became known as Doctor Petty’s Bath.

Today, Grass Wood is peaceful, green and filled with birdsong. Nothing obvious reveals what once stood among its trees. That contrast is precisely what makes the story so unsettling: one of the loveliest walks beside the Wharfe carries a history almost completely hidden by the landscape. Beautiful, memorable and stranger than fiction.

To AutumnPoem By John KeatsPhotography by the amazing Ellis Reed Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-fri...
23/09/2026

To Autumn
Poem By John Keats
Photography by the amazing Ellis Reed

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Why Robin Hood’s Bay Was Built Like ThisFrom above, Robin Hood’s Bay looks almost as though its houses have slipped slow...
21/09/2026

Why Robin Hood’s Bay Was Built Like This

From above, Robin Hood’s Bay looks almost as though its houses have slipped slowly down the cliff towards the sea.

There was never much room to begin with. The old village occupies a steep ravine where two becks meet the North Sea, so generations of fishermen built wherever the ground allowed. Houses went up against houses. Paths became narrow passages. Steps appeared where roads were impossible.

The result is the extraordinary jumble that survives today.

Many cottages are deeper and stranger than their small fronts suggest. Buildings were extended backwards, cellars were dug into the hillside and neighbouring properties became interconnected. This proved extremely useful during the eighteenth century, when smuggling became one of the Bay’s most profitable activities.

Tea, gin, to***co and other heavily taxed goods could be landed on the beach at night and moved rapidly uphill. Customs officers faced a nightmare: steep lanes, concealed yards, interconnected houses and dozens of possible hiding places. The famous claim that contraband could travel from the beach to the top of the village without appearing outside may be folklore, but it perfectly describes the architecture smugglers exploited.

There was another reason for building so tightly: weather.

North Sea storms can be brutal. The packed houses offered one another shelter, while pantile roofs, thick stone walls and narrow lanes helped create protection from winds coming off the water.

Then there is the hill itself.

Anyone who walks down to the harbour eventually has to walk back up. Cars are largely absent from the oldest streets because many routes simply weren’t made for them.

Robin Hood’s Bay wasn’t designed to be picturesque.

Its famous appearance is really the accumulated result of fishermen needing shelter, families needing houses, smugglers needing hiding places and everyone needing to fit into a very small piece of Yorkshire cliff.

You have to love England
16/09/2026

You have to love England

16/09/2026

Much Hadham, Hertfordshire

Much Hadham is only about 30 miles from central London, yet its long High Street can feel considerably further away. Timber-framed houses hide behind later façades, old inns interrupt garden walls and buildings from different centuries sit together with surprisingly little fuss.

The village was already established more than a thousand years ago. By the tenth century, land here belonged to the Bishops of London, who maintained a country residence beside the church. That connection unexpectedly placed Much Hadham near the beginning of the Tudor story. In 1430, Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry V, was staying here with Owen Tudor when their son Edmund was born. Edmund would later become the father of Henry VII.

As Much Hadham grew, the road running through it became increasingly important for travellers moving between London and Cambridge. Houses, workshops, inns and farms gathered along the route, and successive owners altered them rather than starting again. Medieval timber frames acquired Georgian fronts; windows changed; rooms were added. Much of the village’s architectural history is therefore hidden inside buildings that appear much younger.

That habit of adding one age to another continued into the twentieth century.

In 1940, after their Hampstead home was damaged during the Blitz, sculptor Henry Moore and his wife Irina moved to nearby Perry Green. What began as a wartime escape became permanent. Moore gradually acquired surrounding fields and barns, turning them into studios and placing monumental sculptures throughout the landscape.

His connection with the village eventually reached St Andrew’s Church, where two small stone heads carved by Moore in 1953 still sit above the porch.

That is Much Hadham’s real charm. Its history doesn’t arrive as a collection of monuments. It appears gradually: a medieval beam behind a later wall, a Tudor connection beside the church, then a piece of modern sculpture where you least expect it.

Whitby is famous for its abbey, harbour and connection with Dracula, but one of the town’s most extraordinary stories is...
16/09/2026

Whitby is famous for its abbey, harbour and connection with Dracula, but one of the town’s most extraordinary stories is hidden in something much smaller: a piece of polished black stone.

Whitby jet is not actually a stone in the usual sense. It is fossilised wood, formed around 183 million years ago during the Jurassic period and preserved in the rocks of the North Yorkshire coast. People have been turning it into jewellery for thousands of years, but in the 19th century it became the centre of an extraordinary fashion industry.

Black jewellery had long been associated with mourning, but Victorian Britain took the custom to another level. After the death of George IV in 1830, court mourning rules specified jet ornament, while the death of the Duke of Wellington in 1852 brought another surge in demand. Then, after Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria entered prolonged mourning and regularly wore jet. Suddenly, a material gathered from the cliffs around one Yorkshire town became fashionable across Britain and beyond.

Whitby prospered. At the industry’s Victorian peak between about 1860 and 1880, the town had more than 200 jet workshops employing around 1,500 people, supplied by hundreds of mines and collecting sites across the North York Moors. Skilled craftsmen carved necklaces, brooches, bracelets and elaborate ornaments from a material prized because it could achieve a deep black shine while remaining remarkably light to wear.

The fashion eventually faded, and cheaper imitations helped undermine the trade. Yet Whitby jet never entirely disappeared. A small number of craftspeople still work with it today.

So behind one of Victorian Britain’s most recognisable symbols of grief was an unlikely place: a seaside town on the Yorkshire coast whose fossilised trees became part of the way an empire dressed for mourning.

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