Prettiest ones I've been to:

Alfriston, South East England
Burton on the water
Bibury
Castle Coombe
Culross (north of Edinburgh, Scotland)

Bossington. A very small village with beautiful thatched roof houses, very few cars and a restaurant that serves the ultimate scones with clotted cream in a quiet green garden.

Drive through Allerford first.

Bossington: located on the northern Somerset coast.

Notgrove, looks like a small hobbit village. South of the A436, just west of Bourton-on-the-water.

dave

ttt

In the north:
Elsdon
Goathland
Hawes
Haworth
Holmfirth
Bedale
Richmond
In the south:
Lynmouth
Port Isaac
Marazion
Beddingston
Beaminster
Salcombe
Lewes
In the middle and east:
Matlock Bath
Ludlow
Bridgnorth
Rockingham
Broadway
Snowshill
Crowland
Cavendish
Lavenham

That's just a few.

Notgrove is lovely, as are all the other Cotswolds villages mentioned.

Bakewell, Monyash, Hartington in the Peak District are all very nice.

Lee Ann

Exmoor and particularly this part of Exmoor known as 'Little Switzerland' has some fabulous walking.
We were in the very very pretty Lynton & Lynmouth, the 'Walking Capital Of Exmoor'.
We had 3 splendid days walking staying at Shelley's in Lynmouth.
Four National Walking Trails pass through the twin villages, or you can just follow one of the many shorter local walks, they're all great!

Have you noticed this is a SIX year old thread??

And some of us are still checking it out!

Bewdley by the west midlands safari park and Sandbach by Stoke are nice places. Also Canonbie which is 2 miles over the border in scotland has a nice 17th century coach house and a beautiful river flowing through it.

Bookmarking...lots of good info here!

thanks to all

I'm partial to Hangnail-on-the-Pinkey.

Zeus - I thought you would select your hometown - carbuncle-on-the-buttcheek

we love rochester for a slightly bigger town...

chilham, not far from canterbury is a really charming little village with its own mannor house...

haha, I just read the post that this has been going for 6 years haha! I never noticed either. So perhaps we should just ask Mike - where he went!!!

that way he can give us the 100 villages he visited



Scotsgirl

The Meon Valley in Hampshire has some gorgeous villages and breathtaking countryside. I enjoy taking random roads to the different villages. My favorite village is West Meon.

Definitely Loose Chippings

Folks

We are visiting England for one week, with the sole purpose of staying in an English village. I have had this idea for years and wanted to take my son there finally this year. I am looking for a quite, non-touristy place (as much as possible) but one that is close to lots of places and other villages to visit. I have just begun to read about the various regions and most people talk about the Cotswolds. The descriptions and the pics look great, but I wonder if it is a bit too touristy ( the idea of a miniature village is a bit of yellow flag for me). I like to talk my son on mazes and walking paths and visit small shops and antique stores. We'll fly to London and since we don't have a lot of time, I prefer not to drive a whole day (I do plan to rent a car and drive there). I would greatly appreciate your suggestions.

Thanks

The Cotswolds are scarcely touristy at all.

The area's essentially an immense sheep pasture with, by English standards, exceptionally low population density, a few dozen commuter towns and villages and a substantial number of expensive second homes. These days it's also very affluent with close to zero unemployment. Less than 2% of the workforce has any connection with tourism - fewer than in most big cities

This makes a certain kind of British person break out in inverted snobbery and churn out extraordinary myths about how full of tourists it is - myths generally invented on the basis of zero familiiarity with the area.

A handful of very small, agonisingly pretty, villages (above all, Bourton on the Water, Broadway and Bibury) get a few dozen cars visiting between 11 and 4 pm on summer weekends. A slightly larger group of more substantial, but equally photogenic, towns (especially Burford, Chipping Campden, and Stow on the Wold) get about as many tourists at those times as a typical market town will get shoppers: their shops sell more twee gewgaws than hardware, but they're still essentially just buzzy places like any pleasant town.

Outside that small weekend 11-4 window, we're left to our own devices: running global businesses, walking our footpaths, writing next winter's village panto or organising the overthrow of Blair/Brown pseudo-socialism. Which will probably be announced at the Windrush Leisure Centre, in the handsome but utterly untouristy Cotswold town of Witney (or possibly at the next Prime Minster's nearby house), at around 3 am on Friday May 7.