North Meadow, Cricklade: An ancient field where half a million wildflowers create a wall of colour
The spectacular North Meadow, in Cricklade, Wiltshire, is a Secret Britain sight we should all enjoy at least once.


If snake’s head fritillaries bring you joy, then North Meadow at Cricklade is a must.
These nodding flowers — also known as dead men’s bells, bloody warriors, drooping tulips, widow wails and solemn bells of Sodom — create a riot of colour in late spring, when half of million of them cover the ancient hay meadow, Britain’s largest hoard.
Located between the rivers Churn and Thames, it’s prone to flooding, which makes it an ideal habitat for hundreds of wildflowers, including marsh marigolds, pastel-pink cuckoo flowers, ox-eye daisies, knapweed, yellow rattle, buttercups, clouds of creamy meadow-sweet and a multitude of orchids.
You might spot green woodpeckers feeding on anthills, too, as well as strange, carved stones marking ancient hay lots.
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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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