Top British excursions for book lovers

21.07.2023 - 08:21 / roughguides.com / Bill Clinton

If you fancy a book pilgrimage this year, look no further than our round-up of Britain's top literary destinations, taken from the pages of Make The Most Of Your Time In Britain .

Hay-on-Wye is a lovely, little Welsh border town that is a pleasure to hang out in for a variety of perfectly good reasons. But it is really about books. Secondhand books. And antiquarian books. And book festivals. And bookshops filling the former cinema. And book cafés. In fact the whole town has been taken over by the book trade with over thirty bookshops packed into a town (really little more than a village) of around two thousand inhabitants.

It's home to the Hay Festival, an annual celebration of all things booky that Bill Clinton famously dubbed the “Woodstock of the mind”. A-list authors – the likes of Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis – have becume regular features, and Arundhati Roy and DBC Pierre effectively launched their careers here. Now, around fifty thousand festival-goers flock to a self-contained site on the outskirts of Hay-on-Wye, complete with massive marquees, stalls and cafés. Many talks are now broadcast or turned into podcasts, and the festival has even expanded to almost a dozen similar events in Mexico, Spain, the Maldives and India, but there’s no substitute for experiencing the original.

Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts takes place in last May or early June — visit www.hayfestival.com .

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Novelist, poet…architect. Thomas Hardy’s early profession is his least known, and on first glance of Max Gate near Dorchester, the home he designed for himself in 1885, your first thought isn’t of a talent wasted but slight relief that he turned to writing. It’s a gloomy place, solid red brick – but this curiosity is an intriguing stop on the trail of Dorset’s most famous son.

Dorset’s towns and villages, landscape and language permeates all of Hardy’s writing – so Dorchester itself is Hardy’s Casterbridge, the coastal town of Bere Regis becomes Kingsbere and Cerne Abbas is Abbot’s Cernel, the last two both featuring in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. A full tour of Hardy country would take in all these and more – certainly starting in Dorchester. But, more than visiting any individual town, it’s when you explore deep into rural Dorset that Hardy’s words most resonate.

At the centre of his Wessex Heights – which stretch roughly from the Wiltshire/Berkshire border in the east to the Quantocks to the west – is “homely Bulbarrow”, a magnificent hill in north Dorset with an Iron Age fort, Rawlsbury Camp, and views across the county, including Blackmore Vale, Hardy’s “vale of little dairies” and the home of Tess.

The final stop is where his story started: the absurdly picturesque