Destination: Hay-on-Wye
Over the Malvern Hills from Worcestershire, the rolling agricultural landscapes of Herefordshire have an easy-going charm, but the finest scenery hereabouts is along the banks of the River Wye, which wriggles and worms its way across the county linking most of the places of interest.
Straddling the Anglo-Welsh border some twenty miles west of Hereford, the hilly little town of Hay-on-Wye is known to most people for one thing – books. Hay's first bookshop was opened in 1961 by the entrepreneurial Richard Booth, and the town has since become a bibliophile's paradise, with just about every spare inch of the town being given over to the trade, including the old cinema and the ramshackle stone castle.
In summer, the town plays host to a succession of riverside parties and travelling fairs, the pick of which is the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, held over ten days at the end of May, when London's literary world decamps here.
Hay has an attractive setting, amidst rolling forested hills, and its narrow, bendy streets are lined with an engaging assortment of old stone houses. Before you start exploring the town, visit the tourist office to pick up its free leaflet that gives the lowdown on Hay's bookshops together with a street plan. Across the street from the tourist office, a signed footpath leads up the slope to the castle, a careworn Jacobean mansion built into the walls of an earlier medieval fortress. Richard Booth lives in part of the castle, but its southern extremities are given over to a pair of bookshops: Castle Drive Books, which has a large stock of remaindered books, and Hay Castle Bookshop, a trusty collection focused on fine art, cinema, antiquarian and photography. From here, the footpath twists its way round the western flank of the castle to meet the steps that lead down to Castle Street, home to Bookends, at no. 9, where all the books cost £1.
Castle Street slopes up to the main square, High Town, from where it's straight on for Lion Street, where Richard Booth's Bookshop, at no. 44 is a huge, musty, bookish warehouse of a place offering almost unlimited browsing potential. At the foot of Lion Street, the town's main landmark is the ornate, rather Ruritanian, Victorian clocktower.