Castle Cary

Castle Cary is what happens when a Somerset market town gets a mainline station and half of London finds out. Every June the platform fills with people in wellingtons heading for a field seven miles away, and the town watches them go with the expression of a place that has seen this before and priced accordingly. There is a stone lock-up on the corner, built in 1779 to hold the drunk and disorderly, which these days would need to be roughly the size of the Market House. The rest of the year it is quiet, handsome, and entirely uninterested in whether you approve.