Coombe Hill, Buckinghamshire: 'Rare chalk grassland humming with butterflies, wildflowers and grazing cattle'

The view from Coombe Hill, Buckinghamshire, is Friday's Secret Britain selection.

The view from Coombe Hill to Beacon Hill and Aylesbury Plain beyond.
The view from Coombe Hill to Beacon Hill and Aylesbury Plain beyond.
(Image credit: Alamy)
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On a clear day, you can see to the Cotswolds and the North Wessex Downs, but we’ll settle for the beautiful Aylesbury Vale in summer, with rare chalk grassland humming with butterflies, wildflowers and grazing cattle. You also might spot Beacon Hill to the south, with its distinctive clump of trees.

The highest point in the Chilterns, 852ft above sea level, Coombe Hill is crowned with a Boer War monument dedicated to the men of Buckinghamshire.

The Boer War Monument at sunset, Coombe Hill, Buckinghamshire.

The path downhill affords a glimpse of Chequers, donated for the Prime Minister’s use by Lord and Lady Lee of Fareham in 1918, the same year they gave Coombe Hill (once part of the Chequers estate) to the National Trust.

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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