Sway, Hampshire

Sway is the sort of New Forest village where the boldest thing anyone ever did was pour a two-hundred-foot concrete tower into the trees on the advice of a dead architect contacted at a séance, and then die, leaving everyone else to get on with the quiet retirement they plainly came for. The ponies have right of way, the houses have names instead of numbers, and the general pace suggests the place decided some time ago that nothing further needs to happen. It is lovely, it is costly, and it is roughly as edgy as a National Trust tea room.