We have escaped pre-Christmas to stay in Durslade Farmhouse, the eighteenth-century house which Iwan and Manuela Wirth bought five years ago and have restored as a masterpiece of shabby chic:-

In the morning, I walked briskly across the nearby fields, up a hill, to Redlynch, which has an unexpected mid-eighteenth-century church, designed by Nathaniel Ireson and advertising a carol service on Thursday:-