Exmoor ecstasy

There is an absolutely fail-safe way of finding the remotest and most beautiful places to escape to in England – they are anywhere that is at least 50 minutes from a motorway. Now take a look at the map: there are precious few of them.

Most of the Lake District, for example, doesn’t qualify. Almost nothing in the south of England and nothing at all in the Midlands or the industrial North. In fact, leaving Scotland and Wales out of it, you are pretty much left with a little patch of north-east Yorkshire and Northumberland, a smidgeon of the East Anglian coast, the bit of Dorset furthest away from Bournemouth and Exeter and the parts of Cornwall that lie west of Launceston