Berkhamsted is a small market town in the Chiltern Hills, half an hour up the line from London Euston. Despite the commuter traffic and the smart restaurants on the High Street, it is a genuinely historic place — and the place where, in December 1066, the Anglo-Saxon nobility surrendered the kingdom of England to William the Conqueror. The Normans built a motte-and-bailey castle here within months of the conquest, and the surprisingly large earthworks of Berkhamsted Castle still stand at the north end of town, with the ruined flint walls of the later stone keep wrapped in two concentric moats.
The High Street follows the route of an old Roman road and is lined with Georgian and Victorian shopfronts — and survivors like the timber-framed Dean Incent's House and the restored Art Deco Rex Cinema. Behind it run the parallel ribbons of the Grand Union Canal and the West Coast Main Line — the canal is one of the prettiest stretches near London, with narrowboats moored along towpath walks that reach Tring in one direction and the centre of London in the other. The novelist Graham Greene, whose father was headmaster of Berkhamsted School, grew up here and used the town's hedgerows and chalkpits as the backdrop for several novels.
Beyond town the Ashridge Estate — 5,000 acres of National Trust beechwoods and chalk downland — climbs the Chiltern escarpment, with bluebells in spring and free-roaming fallow deer year round. Berkhamsted works well as a half-day stop on the way to or from Tring or Aylesbury, or as a base for a weekend's walking in the Chilterns.