Cartmel

Cartmel is barely a village — a cobbled square, a priory, a racecourse on the edge of things, and a population you could fit into a decent-sized pub — and yet it holds L’Enclume, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant that draws people from Tokyo and New York to a settlement most maps of the Lake District don’t bother labelling. I did not eat at L’Enclume, because the waiting list runs months and my budget runs considerably shorter, but I stood outside it for a minute feeling the specific vertigo of a genuinely world-class kitchen operating out of a converted smithy in a village this size.

What I did eat, at the Cartmel Village Shop, was the original sticky toffee pudding — the shop claims, with reasonable evidence, to have invented the recipe that later became a national institution, and they still make it by hand and ship it all over the country. I bought one, warmed it badly in a farmhouse microwave that evening, and ate the entire thing without a shred of restraint. It did not need the ceremony of a fine restaurant to be one of the best things I ate in England.

Cartmel Priory itself dates to the twelfth century and survived the dissolution of the monasteries largely because the local parish successfully argued the nave was needed as their parish church — a piece of quick thinking eight hundred years ago that left the village with a genuinely grand medieval building entirely out of scale with everything around it. Inside, the light through the east window falls across worn stone floors in a way that made me stop talking mid-sentence to my own surprise. The racecourse next to the village, meanwhile, hosts a scrappy, joyfully unpretentious meeting a few times a year that has nothing to do with Ascot’s formality and everything to do with local families having a proper day out.

When to go: Book L’Enclume months ahead if that’s your reason for coming; otherwise any weekend works, though racedays bring the whole village noticeably to life. The priory is quietest early morning before the day-trippers arrive.