Look a Brit familiar?
The stunning vineyards of Italy and waterways of Holland may be temporarily out of reach – but don’t despair, we’ve got their equivalent and much more in our backyard waiting for us when the coronavirus lockdown is lifted...
GOING DUTCH Norfolk & Netherlands
Alone windmill at the water’s edge, a sky stitched with skeins of geese, and smoked eel on the menu of the waterside brasserie. It may sound like a corner of Holland, but this is the Norfolk Broads, that 116-squaremile mosaic of marshland, rivers and lakes in deepest East Anglia. This landscape is pancake flat so if you explore it by road, you will see little more than occasional windmills playing peekaboo over the reeds.
On a boat, though, you enter a parallel universe of waterside gazebos, loggias, verandas, pavilions and lawns, each with a dinghy bobbing alongside, just like in the Netherlands.
The Dutch influence is all-pervasive here. Dutch engineers helped create the drainage system for the Fens, and the West Norfolk town of King’s Lynn, with its
gable-topped red-brick merchant houses lined up alongside the quayside, could have been transplanted straight from the Low Countries.
The shoreline echoes the Netherlands, too. Those wide-open Norfolk beaches at Holkham and Hunstanton could so easily be the fringes of the super-shallow Dutch Wadden Sea, where embarrassed yachties are regularly stranded on the sands by the outgoing tide. visitnorfolk.co.uk
PASTIS AND PASTIES Cornwall & Brittany
The Cornwall and Brittany coasts have so many similarities, it is almost as if they are mirror images on either side of the Channel. Brittany even has a region called Cornouaille, for heaven’s sake!
Both regions share a Celtic history, both have spectacular shorelines punctured by creeks, sandy beaches and steep fishing villages.
Both have an artistic tradition, with Impressionists including Gauguin decamping to Pont Aven, while British artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson made their own creative colony at St Ives. Both have a tidal St Michael, an inhabited island sitting on an outcrop of rock, cut off twice a day.
The French Mont Saint-michel, on the bay where Brittany and Normandy merge, is topped by a monastery, while the British St Michael’s Mount, near Penzance, is topped by a medieval priory and castle.
Food-wise, Cornwall may not have the shellfish farms of southern Brittany, but it does have a posh seafood heaven in Rick Stein’s Padstow. And where the Bretons like their pastis drinks, the Cornish are mad about pasties.
visitcornwall.com
CARIBBEAN BLUE Scotland & tropic beaches
That lucent blue, that spotless sky, that lapping of a crystalline sea... and that sharp intake of breath as you dip your toe. The beaches of Luskentyre, on the isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, and at Arisaig, on the Scottish mainland, look every inch as good as the Caribbean – and here you can have them all to yourself.
Mind you, you’d be brave to stretch out in your swimming costume sipping a piña colada on these shores.
Better savour a single malt by a fragrant fire while gazing out over the silken sands, particularly from one of the magnificent holiday homes for rent on the Harris coastline, just south of Luskentyre.
Of course, Harris takes a bit of reaching, so the Arisaig beaches, which featured in the film Local Hero, are a bit easier.
To reach it you could even jump on the Jacobite, the steam-hauled train between Fort William and Mallaig which stops there – it played the part of the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films.
It’s a magical way to reach this spectacular part of the world.
visitscotland.com
CITY DOUBLES Manchester & New York London & Venice
Being transported into another world is not just the preserve of the countryside.
London can play that trick in several locations, particularly Brick Lane with its Bangladeshi community, Green Lanes (Turkish), and Edgware Road (Middle East).
It has Little Venice, that stretch of the Regent’s Canal lined with beautifully decorated narrowboats, although “Little Amsterdam” may be more appropriate, given the number of “liveaboards”.
A good candidate for Venice of the North is Manchester, which also does a very convincing imitation of Boston or New York.
The Venetian part of the city is the canal network that carved up the centre during the industrial revolution, carrying raw materials and textiles to and from docks and factories.
These days the waterways that remain are sociable threadlines through the centre, lined with pubs and restaurants. As for the New York lookalike, film directors love the city’s Northern Quarter, brimful of blocks with external fire escapes.
Spiderman spin-off Morbius was shot here last year, and the streets were full of NYC yellow cabs.
visitmanchester.com
SCANDI NOIR Highlands & Scandinavia
The popular imagery of Scandinavia – tundra, deer, impenetrable forest and spectacular fjords – are all available north of the border, if you know where to look.
For a true tundra experience you can’t fault Rannoch Moor, that huge welter of bog and rock just south of Glen Coe.
Its only man-made crossing is the Glasgow to Fort William railway, parts of which effectively float on log rafts, and it’s a paradise for red deer. If it’s forest you’re after, a huge area of Perthshire around Pitlochry has been designated Big Tree Country since the historic planting 200 years ago of some 25 million trees, including larch, Douglas fir and maple.
And for spectacular fjords, visit any number of mountain-surrounded sea lochs all over the Highlands, some with castles.
One magnificent view is from the Bealach na Bà (Pass of the Cattle), en route to the village of Applecross. The steepest road ascent in the UK, it rises from sea level to 2,054ft in a series of hairpin bends. The reward is a fabulous view
across to the Isle of Skye.
LA DOLCE VITA Vineyards, Portmeirion & Italy
Now climate change has brought us liquid sunshine (aka wine), we might as well have a go at pretending we’re in Tuscany.
Many a Kentish fruit farm has found new life as a vineyard in places like Hush Heath, Chapel Down and Gusbourne, the latter near the very pretty village of Appledore.
Elsewhere, at Denbies Wine Estate in Surrey and the Three Choirs vineyard in Gloucestershire, you can dine and sleep among the vines, imagining yourself in Chianti country.
But Italian fantasy is made concrete in the village of Portmeirion, which has transported Liguria to north-west Wales.
In a spectacular setting framed in mountains on a headland overlooking the Dwyryd river estuary, the village was lovingly created by eccentric architect Clough Williams-ellis in the style of a colourful Italian village, with a piazza and Baroque-inspired domes.
There are self-catering cottages and hotel rooms in a fanciful mix of Italianate styles, in all colours, with ornamental gardens between. visitwales.com