Oxfordshire Splendor: Tea at Highclere, and Four Nights at Le Manoir

We'll begin the journey with afternoon tea at Highclere Castle, before we even reach the hotel. Yes — that Highclere. The library, the oak staircase, and the State Rooms you know from Downton Abbey are all the real thing. There has been a house on this land for thirteen hundred years, and it sits amidst a thousand acres of parkland.

A private tour followed by sandwiches, scones, and a proper cup of tea — then a short drive through the countryside to Le Manoir, where we’ll spend our first four nights.

Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons is a Belmond hotel in the Oxfordshire village of Great Milton. We’ll be some of the first guests to enjoy the property after a current multi-million dollar renovation — I was there last year and can’t wait to see the updated rooms and restaurants. With thirty-two rooms, each one different, and lavender gardens, sixteenth-century ponds, and croqueton the lawn.

The restaurant earned two Michelin stars within months of opening, and has held them every year since. In 2021 it also received one of Michelin's first Green Stars, for the two-acre kitchen garden that feeds the menu: ninety varieties of vegetable, seventy herbs, and a heritage orchard.

One morning belongs to the garden: the potager, the herb beds, the heritage orchard — where we'll cut flowers and foliage and learn to arrange them. After a leisurely lunch and some spa time we’ll have a cooking class, and dinner made from what we've prepared. Other days take us out exploring: a buggy tour of Blenheim Palace gardens followed by a visit to its illustrious state rooms, and a full day among the honey-coloured Cotswolds villages — Upper and Lower Slaughter, Broadway, Burton-on-the-Water and Stow-on-the-Wold, where two yews have grown to frame north door of St Edward's church. Local legend has it that the doors are the inspiration for Tolkien’s Doors of Durin. We'll finish down the road with an afternoon tea and shopping at Daylesford Organic — where the vegetables come out of the market garden and the cheese is made in a creamery on site — then back to Le Manori for dinner, and the pleasant business of finding out what everyone bought.

We choose five-star properties for a reason. At a hotel like this, an afternoon spent doing nothing at all is one of the pleasures of the journey. View trip details here.