Its hard to imagine that the picturesque village of Castle Combe was once a small, busy, town. It was a weaving centre, with mills, 50 or so cottages housing weavers, a mixture of shops and a weekly market. Then the water levels in the streams fell, the mills went into decline and the shops closed as people moved to find employment elsewhere.

For many years things changed very slowly. Walter De Dunstaville (1270) whose family owned the Castle after the Norman conquest, has his tomb in the church. Later, the Scrope family moved in as Lords of the manor and stayed for nearly 500 years. In 1947 the whole village was put up for auction by the Lord of the Manor. Visitors often ask the location of the Castle, it no longer exists, but its original site was about half a mile to the north west of the Manor House, at the top of a rise overlooking the Bybrook valley.

In the fifties a Tithe Barn was pulled down, the Market Hall had suffered the same fate a hundred years earlier, but 1962, in a competition organised by an American travel company Castle Combe was voted England's most beautiful village. Immediately bus loads of tourists descended on the village and things have never been the same. The village was used as the location for the film "The Story of Doctor Dolittle" and others since. TV travel shows visited, the village became image conscious and with the help of money from the film makers changed from being merely pretty to become something of a showpiece. You will find no television aerials, no parked cars - except around the pubs.

Apart from the upmarket hotel and guest houses and a few souvenir shops, there is no trade. Castle Combe remains England's most beautiful village. The cottages are perhaps prettier than they ever were, the bridge over the Bybrook the most photographed.

When you visit, look hard, then close your eyes and try to imagine the place two or three hundred years ago. The real Castle Combe.