Though it sounds like one of the home counties, you won’t find Wessex on a 21st-century map of Britain. It was, in fact, the name given to the ancient kingdom of the West Saxons, an area covering much south England. As Destination Wessex puts it, this is “the land of King Arthur and King Alfred, of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, of Bath and Stonehenge,” yet the North Wessex Downs is undoubtedly its most picturesque corner.
While the area is bordered by some larger towns, such as Reading, Basingstoke and the horse-racing hotspot of Newbury, the North Wessex Downs themselves are blissfully rural. It is an officially designated ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, the third largest in England at 668 square miles, and it is easy to see why.…