Wells, Somerset

Wells is England's smallest city in the way a Yorkshire terrier is technically a wolf. There is a cathedral, a moat, a bishop who still lives in his own palace, and swans trained to ring a bell for food, which tells you roughly everything about the pace of local ambition. Film crews turn up whenever a script calls for somewhere that stopped changing in about 1450, and the place obliges, because it did. Come for the stone, stay for the cheese, but do not expect anything to open after five.