Some landscapes make the built environment placed upon them seem ephemeral.

With minimal imagination, you can picture the scene in front of you in a time before town or village life had intruded on nature. On other occasions, it seems the brickwork is as the earth, immutable. To guess at the roots of this sentiment leads you to well-worn conclusions: generally, the older, the better. It is “English Heritage”: wooden beams, orchards, overhanging walls and hedgerows are of equal evidence in our summation of the past, and thus what is ‘natural’ and what isn’t.

All roads lead to Poundbury, and a plague on your pylons? Not quite. But confronted with an old market town high street and the tumbledown George Inn, an impartial mindset tends to waver. Plastic history-boards bastardise the authenticity, but you’re drawn to them nonetheless. Battles. Kings stopping for the night. Centuries of passing precedent. You move around to the side entrance (not feeling grand enough for the big door); a back-garden view of fields and church. Inside is austere, cool/cold, high-backed oak chairs, slate floors, bedraggled rugs and a calming mustiness. Wallow unashamedly in West Country historicism.