
The UK's best hidden gem tourist attraction revealed
Looking to escape tourist traps in the UK this summer?
A new study has unearthed the country's best hidden gems for Brits and created a hotlist of underrated landmarks.
The research looked at the number of reviews, the tourist traffic per landmark and the cost of public transport to create the list.
So, where are the UK's best hidden gems?
According to the study, the Wasdale Emerald Pool in Cumbria is the country's best hidden gem.
Sometimes known as the 'Fairy Pool', the picturesque spot is formed by several small waterfalls and has a bright green colour.
Next on the list are the Birmingham Back to Backs. A museum operated by The National Trust, the Back to Backs are the city's last surviving back-to-back houses.
Built around a communal courtyard, the houses were occupied from around 1840 right through until the 1970s.
As they explore the historic houses, tourists will get a glimpse into what it was like to live there through the decades. The Back to Backs are only accessible via a guided tour so tourists will need to book their tickets in advance.
The third best hidden gem in the UK is Freshwater West Beach in Pembrokeshire in Wales.
Although the beach is quite popular with surfers, it's not nearly as well-known as other beaches in the area with just 234 reviews on Tripadvisor.
Tulleys Farm in Crawley just misses out on a spot on the podium, ranking as the UK's fourth-best hidden gem.
The family farm in West Sussex has a pumpkin picking patch, an annual Christmas Lights festival and escape rooms for visitors.
Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire rounds out the top five. A National Trust property, the Tudor Manor is known for its 'quirky character'.
The National Trust reveals: 'Seeing the tumbling architecture of Little Moreton Hall for the first time, engineers in 1990 could not believe their eyes.
'This timber-framed building, curled around with a scenic moat, has defied logic for over 500 years.'
Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, the Royal Yacht Britannia in Edinburgh and Samlesbury Hall in Lancashire are also among the country's top 10 hidden gems.
Corin Camenisch, marketing and growth leader at SumUp, which commissioned the research, says: 'We created this ranking to spotlight some of the UK's hidden gems, places that are often overlooked in favour of the usual tourist spots like the London Eye or Buckingham Palace.
'By highlighting these underrated hotspots, we're hoping to show people spots they might not know about and spread the benefits of local tourism.
'These hidden gems often rely on tourism to sustain their operations, and by shining a light on them, we're hoping to ensure that local businesses can benefit from a steady flow of visitors, which is crucial for their growth and long-term success.'
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Telegraph
2 hours ago
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The 17 best restaurants in Pembrokeshire
Caught between the sea and the mountains, Pembrokeshire has access to some of the finest (and freshest) produce in Wales. Here distinctly season-driven restaurant menus sing with local seafood and farm-fresh cheeses, not to mention Preseli lamb and beef, all elevated to new heights with garden-grown vegetables and herbs. In recent years the county has seriously upped its culinary game in a number of slickly modern restaurants, where bold, creative menus are often pepped up with foraged ingredients. And should you prefer a chilled fish shack by the sea or a good old-fashioned country pub, there is of course that too. All our recommendations below have been hand selected and tested by our resident destination expert to help you discover the best restaurants in Pembrokeshire. Find out more below or discover our guide to Pembrokeshire and the best hotels, nightlife, beaches and things to do in the area. Find a restaurant by type: Best all rounders Best for families Best for fine dining Best for walk ins Best for views Best farm-to-table Best all rounders Blas Housed in the minimalist-chic Twr Y Felin hotel, where Welsh architect Keith Griffiths has worked his magic on a former windmill, Blas translates as 'taste'. Snagging a table for dinner at this dark, seductive restaurant means you also get to nose around a fine collection of street art, with silver-screen starlets (Audrey Hepburn and co.) by graffiti artist Pure Evil gracing the charcoal walls in the low-lit bistro. Food is artfully presented, seasonally driven and sprinkled with foraged ingredients: from Solva crab with green tomato, turnip and crispy chicken skin, to butter-soft beef with beetroot, shallot, horseradish and nasturtium. The intimate ambience makes this a romantic date-night pick.


Daily Mail
10 hours ago
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One Day author DAVID NICHOLLS on whether he'll ever write a sequel
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The most miles he's done in a day is 30 – after a march across the North York Moors. His step count can sometimes reach 45,000 and, on average, he moves at a 'steady' pace of three miles per hour. He has kit, too: a compass he was given by that walking-sceptic editor ('I hardly ever use it, but I have it!'); a pair of 'proper Italian boots that I really love'; a handheld navigational tool to download routes in advance; and a paper map. He also has walking-related apps, including AllTrails and Outdooractive, but prefers to bury his phone right at the bottom of his rucksack and not look at it. The editor who bought Nicholls the compass also got him a waterproof notebook, which he keeps in his pocket. 'I always think I'm going to sit on a mountaintop and compose something wonderful. No, it all happens when I come back – at my desk, warm and dry.' Nicholls grew up in Eastleigh, Hampshire, the middle child of three. His father was a maintenance engineer in a cake factory, his mother worked for the council, and nobody did much walking. As a teenager Nicholls began going 'for long, soulful walks along the Water Meadows in Winchester'. (He was, he says, 'a pretentious 18-year-old'.) He has a son and a daughter with his partner of more than 20 years, Hannah Weaver, and they have attempted various family walking holidays. 'We had a couple of very, very, very wet trips to the Yorkshire Dales.' But the proper, solitary, 45,000-steps-a-day sort of walking began 11 years ago, after his father died. 'I just felt I needed to go away and spend some time by myself,' Nicholls says, 'and my family were very understanding.' He had always liked the look of the stretch of Northumbrian coast that you see from the train window if you're travelling from London to Edinburgh. So, he went there. 'I wasn't expecting any kind of miracles to happen,' he says, 'but I just wanted some time.' He walked for four days, ten hours a day, alone. 'It was the longest time I'd been by myself in ten years.' There were no miracles, but he loved it and has been 'ticking off' routes since. (He thinks he's done 15 in a decade.) Because he doesn't like being away from home for too long, his walking is in England and he favours the North. His attitude is 'fair weather: I don't camp. I never do anything that's really, seriously in the wilderness. Often, I can hear an A-road. I've never been inclined to…' a dark pause, '…mountaineer.' But there are physical benefits to these trudges. 'I've always hated all sport. If anyone kicks a ball towards me, I immediately panic. Walking is the nearest I get to a physical activity that I actually enjoy.' Nicholls is also an insomniac, and walking 'is the thing that's guaranteed to make me sleep all the way through'. Sometimes he walks with his partner and he mentions a recent father-and-son walking trip to the Three Peaks in Yorkshire, but mostly Nicholls walks alone. The balance between solitude and loneliness is a lot of what You Are Here is about. Nicholls is preoccupied with it himself. 'I live with my family, but I guess I felt that after Covid I'd found ways to enjoy time by myself, so much so that I sort of stopped seeing my friends and became a bit nervous about going out for dinner and catching up. I had to give myself a bit of a talking-to,' he says. 'I had to decide to make an effort. 'In your teens and 20s, you really want to know everyone and meet everyone and talk and share and listen to stories. And I think that dwindles as you get older – it becomes much harder to rediscover that pleasure. So I guess the book is about two people who have found a way to make [loneliness] work, but who are then reminded of the value of connection.' Nicholls edited You Are Here in 2023, as the Netflix adaptation of his novel One Day was being made. (He wrote the penultimate episode and was an executive producer.) 'In the day they were filming Dexter clubbing in Brixton in 1993, and in the evenings I was editing this book about walking the Coast to Coast path in middle age. But Michael and Marnie are the same age as Emma and Dexter are by the end of One Day, so there's a kind of continuity to it.' Nicholls has written six novels (his fourth, Us, was longlisted for the Booker Prize) but One Day is what he's best known for. He's not grumbling. The book has sold more than six million copies and that success is 'thrilling'. And, 'if writers often get a bit grumpy about film adaptations [of their novels]', he won't bother with that either. In 2011, One Day was turned into a film he wrote the screenplay for, and last year there was the Netflix behemoth. 'I was offered two lines in the final episode. A man walks into Dexter's café and says, 'This used to be a fish shop.' They said, 'Why don't you do a little Hitchcock cameo?' I firmly turned them down. Honestly, they would have had to use CGI.' (Nicholls worked as an actor in his 20s and says he was no good – 'I could really only play clerks and servants' – but also understudied for a main part in The Seagull at the National Theatre with Judi Dench, so he can't have been bad.) One Day's concept came from a moment in Tess Of The D'Urbervilles when Tess considers – and don't read this if you somehow don't know the end of One Day – her 'death date', or, as she thinks about it: 'a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there'. So when I ask if there was ever a version where Emma didn't – look away! – die, he replies: 'Nope! It was about the one day that is your death day. That was always the idea.' 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My only response is to be enraged with myself about wasted time, scrolling on the internet when I could be working or reading or speaking to friends. I have to get on with things now.' He adds: 'All of which makes me great fun to live with, I'm sure.' Nicholls turns 60 next year, so I ask what he is going to do to celebrate. 'Well,' he says, 'I'll probably go for a walk.'


Times
12 hours ago
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Ten essential tips on how to draw, by a leading British artist
The English artist and designer David Gentleman, 95, has been drawing, painting, illustrating and engraving for more than eight decades. He still sketches every day without fail, looking out from his studio window in central London, or walking at home or abroad with a sketchbook, a pencil, a paintbox and a few brushes packed into a small bag. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1953, he has completed hundreds of commissions — among them the National Trust's oak-leaf logo, the 1970s New Penguin Shakespeare paperbacks, the 100m-long mural at Charing Cross Underground station (1978), dozens of stamps and travel books. Here, he shares his advice on developing a drawing habit for life. How to begin? This is one of the most difficult questions. I would always start small, choosing something nearby to draw — a tree or the view from the window. Keep your expectations slight. And begin with a pencil — a soft pencil is easiest and lightest, although light or hard graphite pencils or charcoal sticks are worth trying out. Have a go at what catches your eye. For me, that's barns and trees; light and dark; near and far — just a few lines to suggest distance. The most valuable thing about drawing is that it makes you look harder at the world around you. It enhances your power of attention. I like going out on foot and drawing what I see on the street, things like cranes, curved streets, canals, trees and traffic. But it's important to vary it from time to time. It may sound mundane, but even taking a bus ride can be fruitful. If you sit at the front of the top deck and take in your surroundings from this higher vantage point, you have the whole landscape ahead and you'll see things — buildings, trees, the skyline, people — in a new light. A scene doesn't have to be picturesque to make a good picture. Juxtapositions are interesting; prettifying a scene isn't. It isn't about trying to make something beautiful. For example, the duomo at Monreale in Sicily is a wonderful spectacle, and drawing it was the perfect way of enjoying and gradually understanding the complicated patterns of its structure. A Fiat parked in the foreground wasn't exactly majestic, but it struck me as an expression of Italy's more recent industrial strength. On display were two kinds of Italian brilliance. • The power of the pencil — by Hockney, Emin, Gormley and more Mistakes come in all shapes and sizes, but they aren't to be feared. Often they are reversible: with oils, you can paint over what you've done. With pencils it's much the same. With pen and ink or watercolour you have to be more careful. But even if your line looks wrong, it's still worth keeping it going bit by bit: the work grows as you add to it, and that can take care of any mistakes. Once, when my son was playing the piano, I decided to draw him quickly. I drew three feet, but the one in the middle wasn't worth rubbing out: it added a sense of motion. Generally, it's worth not messing around. Eventually, you'll find that your 'style' — the result of all your small choices, experiments and mistakes — will emerge. I've never had any interest in consciously developing a style. I'm not even sure it is something you can decide to generate. It just happens: you evolve over time. So it's worth trying to be single-minded, energetic and yourself. When I began using watercolours, I found new ways to paint and draw through doing it regularly and experimenting. Memorably, this happened in 1995 in Bologna, when I was sitting in a café, slightly raised above the main square. I was alone, having a glass of beer and facing the duomo. It was a wonderful view. The square was full of life. I wanted to capture it — but nobody was standing still. I began a pen drawing. It had to be done very quickly. I couldn't have painted it. If I didn't move fast, the people I was drawing would be blocked off or disappear. Afterwards I added a colour wash (a little paint added to water): you can see it is slightly bigger than the drawings. This way of working has become one of the styles I most enjoy. • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews It's perfectly possible to take a photo of a scene and then spend hours back at home drawing it. But I think it's good to draw on the spot — scribbling what you see, before the moment passes. There are many more possibilities that arise when you do this; the scene changes, new people come past and new details come into view. There's also a liberation, a release, that happens when you work quickly. I think you often get better work this way. You don't have to draw particularly carefully to capture what you're after — you can do it in almost no time at all. You can spoil work by being too careful. I was once in Rio de Janeiro for just two days, and looked at the city from my hotel window. It was too tempting not to draw. The height of everything made me draw it on a vertical sheet of paper. The street at my feet was in deep shadow, while the cliff was gleaming. Had I seen it on a different day it might not have spurred me to draw the scene: it was the sun, there and then, that made me work. I've spent 50 years looking out of the same studio window, at the top of my house, five storeys up. I like the trees in front of me, and the parakeets and pigeons that land on them, as well as the crows and seagulls that float in circles above them and the Victorian and Edwardian architecture beyond them too. These views have changed over time: all the distant skylines have vanished as new buildings have got taller. But I'm interested every day in the changing weather, the clouds moving across the sky. Most days, a crow perches on the birch tree, usually on its own. One day, I quickly drew a pen and wash watercolour sketch and was pleased with the results — particularly the curve of its talons. After I graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1953, my first professional commission was a set of wood engravings for a book called What About Wine? I'd been interested in engraving ever since my father gave me a book of Eric Ravilious's work when I was about 17. The commission was a success, and I got more for engravings, but it's a laborious process and my enthusiasm for it has varied. So I have engraved only when I felt it was worth taking on, and have enjoyed it all the more for doing it in my own way, in my own style. I particularly liked engraving the complete New Penguin Shakespeare series in the 1970s, combining wood engravings with colour. Negative feedback can alert you to something you might not otherwise have noticed, and often there is something you can do to put it right. It's important to develop a capacity to be self-critical, because that's how you will gradually get your work closer to how you intended it to be. I seldom feel complacent about what I'm doing; this self-criticism is part of the continual process of working out how to do things better. One chilly February, I made some pictures of the Piazza del Campo in Siena, drawing in pen and ink as quickly as possible. I wanted to capture the piazza's overall D-shape, and kept drawing and redrawing until I felt happy with the outcome. I spent two days working like this. It can't be wished on you. Don't worry — just do what you can. I don't waste time thinking about how good or bad a drawing is. When I'm at work on a picture, I hope it will end up interesting, and I try to enjoy the process. That's about for Young Artists by David Gentleman is published on Jul 10 (Penguin £20 pp192). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members What's your advice on developing a drawing habit? Share your tips in the comments below