Dunstable

Coaching Inns and Chalk Downs

The Saracen's Head sits well below the road in front of it, on High Street South, and once you notice this you cannot un-notice it. The old coaching route has been resurfaced so many times over the centuries that the carriageway has crept up past the inn's front step. As one description of it has it, "It is positioned considerably lower than the road to its front, witness to the fact that the road has been resurfaced a number of times." Further along, on High Street North, the Old Sugar Loaf keeps the coaching gates from the days when Dunstable was a staging town on Watling Street, the London to Holyhead road. The A5 still follows that Roman line straight through the middle of everything.

The real reason to come is the ground to the south. Dunstable Downs rise straight out of the town to 243 metres, the highest point in Bedfordshire, with the whole Vale of Aylesbury opening up to the west. People fly kites off the escarpment, and hang-gliders and paragliders launch from the edge; the London Gliding Club works conventional gliders from the field at the foot of the slope. The National Trust's Chilterns Gateway Centre sits up top with a café and is the sensible place to begin a walk. The Icknield Way Path and the Chiltern Way both cross the Downs, and a circular trail runs along the chalk to Whipsnade village. The west-facing slope is grazed chalk grassland, which in summer brings bee orchids and butterflies — chalkhill blues, marbled whites. On the ridge, the Five Knolls barrows hold Bronze Age burials; one excavation turned up a mother and child.

Whipsnade Wildlife and the Tree Cathedral

Two miles on lies Whipsnade Zoo, at 600 acres the largest in the country, home to more than ten thousand animals. You can walk it, drive it, or take the narrow-gauge railway round. Below the zoo the Whipsnade White Lion is cut into the chalk hillside, visible for miles from the B489. Nearby, the Tree Cathedral is a garden of trees laid out to the plan of a medieval cathedral, free to wander.

The Surviving Priory Church

Back in the town, the Priory Church of St Peter is the surviving nave of a much larger Augustinian priory founded by Henry I in the 1130s, with two western towers and a great west front of four arches. In 1533 the priory's Lady Chapel hosted the court where Cranmer pronounced Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon null and void. The rest of the priory is gone; the nave is Norman and the stained glass all twentieth-century.

From Durocobrivis to Dunstable

Dunstable has no Domesday entry, because in 1086 it did not exist. Henry I founded a new town at the crossroads of Watling Street and the Icknield Way, on the site of the Roman posting station of Durocobrivis, and granted its first charter in 1131.

The Busway and the Westward View

There have been no passenger trains since 1965. Luton, five miles east, is the nearest railhead, reached on the guided busway whose vehicles run at up to fifty miles an hour along sections of their own concrete track. The Downs, meanwhile, stay where they are, holding the view west across the Vale of Aylesbury.