Getting the flavour of…

Touring Lake Constance

Even on a sunny day, there’s something “powerful and elemental” about Lake Constance, the 40-mile-long, eight-mile-wide bulge in the Rhine that lies at the meeting point of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Its waters have been “a crossroads” since before Roman times, said William Cook in The Daily Telegraph, and though popular with regional tourists, the pretty towns on its banks retain a reassuringly workaday air. The largest, Konstanz, is an hour by train from Zurich airport, and from there, visiting the others by ferry is great fun, making for the sort of holiday that might have sent a Victorian traveller into ecstasies. Among the highlights are Meersburg (“quaint”), Lindau (“absurdly picturesque”), peaceful Rorschach and on the Austrian shore, Bregenz, which has a Viennese-style grandeur that feels “dreamlike” in this setting.

Visit germany.travel and myswitzerland.com for more information. The prettiest city in Canada

With its “dainty” historic centre perched on a bluff above the Saint Lawrence River, Québec City has a “fairytale” quality unmatched by any other large town in North America – and getting there just got easier, says Jonathan Thompson in The Sunday Times, thanks to the launch of new Air Transat flights from Gatwick, the first direct service from the UK. You might stay at the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac, a “towered and turreted” 19th century hotel that dominates the city’s skyline, and offers easy access to its beautifully preserved old town, founded by French settlers in 1608. The city’s restaurant scene is strong (look up Tanière³ and Le Saint-Amour) and there’s lovely countryside nearby, good for adventure sports or more genteel trips, such as an e-bike tour of the orchards, wineries and waterside villages of the idyllic Île d’Orléans.

A pilgrim’s way in East Anglia

Passing flint-clad villages and “bluebellstrewn” woods, the Walsingham Way gives you a sense of a landscape that was trodden by countless pilgrims in the Middle Ages, says Oliver Smith in the FT. Established last year, this 37-mile path leads from Norwich Cathedral to the village of Walsingham, one of the greatest medieval holy sites, where the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to a Saxon noblewoman, Richeldis de Faverches, in 1061. The Holy House she built – intended as a replica of the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth – was ruined during the Reformation. But interest in Walsingham revived in the 1920s, restoring “a missing piece in the jigsaw of English spirituality”. Today, it has Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox churches, and even an atheist might feel “a tremor in their heart” on arrival.