The Black Horse sits at 1 Bedford Street, exposed beams inside and a large free public car park round the corner on Park Street. It belongs to the Peach Pubs group, and the kitchen leans on local and seasonal ingredients: the Sunday roast arrives with crispy potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, vegetables and gravy, alongside well-kept ales and a considered wine and cocktail list. A short way off, the Woburn Hotel occupies one of the old coaching inns from the days when the town was a staging post, trading now under a newer name than the Bedford Arms it once was.
For something more deliberate, Paris House stands in the deer park itself, on London Road, inside the grounds of the Woburn Estate. Chef Phil Fanning runs a six-course Signature Tasting Menu and modern British cooking there; it opens Thursday to Sunday and closes the first half of the week. It is the sort of place you book ahead for and dress up a little.
The high street is Georgian, straight-fronted and even, given over in large part to antiques dealers and independent shops. It looks the way it does because the town burned down three times: a medieval chimney fire, a Civil War blaze set by Cavaliers, and a major fire in 1724, after which Woburn was rebuilt in the style you now walk through. The Market House at the central crossroads, designed by Edward Blore and finished in 1830, anchors the whole arrangement.
St Mary's on Park Street is the large Victorian church, built between 1865 and 1868 by Henry Clutton and paid for by the 8th Duke of Bedford at a cost of £30,000. It once carried a spire that took its total height to 195 feet, until structural problems forced the spire's removal in 1890. Inside hang a bell of 55 hundredweight, cast in London, and an east window by Charles Eamer Kempe. The crypt was meant to be a Bedford family vault; the Dukes were buried elsewhere, and it now hosts events.
The walking is estate walking. The Greensand Ridge Walk, forty miles from Leighton Buzzard to Gamlingay, runs straight through the village, its waymarkers carrying the silhouette of a muntjac deer. Beyond the houses spreads the roughly 3,000-acre deer park, grazed by several species, among them the Père David's deer, which owe their survival to the 11th Duke, Herbrand Russell. After the animals were all but wiped out in China, he gathered the last survivors from European zoos into a breeding herd here — eighteen deer, of which eleven could breed. Every Père David's deer alive today descends from that group at Woburn.
The nearest station is Woburn Sands, about two miles north on the Bedford–Bletchley line, roughly one train an hour and none on Sundays. By road it is three miles to the M1 at junction 13 and about five to Milton Keynes.
Woburn was once a town of 27 inns and the first 24-hour post office outside London, before the railways, canal and main roads all routed around it and the population fell by half. The deer are still here, and on a quiet morning you will see one before you see anyone else.