The last in this series of underexplored, overlooked, bypassed towns revisits three places loosely linked to somewhere I’ve lived at different stages of my life. Relocating is grand-scale vacationing, as there are a few months when the new place feels like a holiday destination – fresh, strange, not filtered and tainted by habit or prejudice. Going back years later is part-pilgrimage, part-funeral.

Harrow

The lexicon of suburbia – commuting, dormitory, cul-de-sac, privet hedge – resonates with not seeing. In densely peopled north-west London, you have to dig – with eyes, books and boots – to find the occluded past.

In a 767 charter, Harrow is Gumeninga hergae, the “heathen temple of the Gumeningas [tribe]”. The small hill – pronounced on old sketches – was a natural spot for practising worship; harrows are found all over England. Later it was part of the archbishop of Canterbury’s estate and by Domesday had 70 ploughlands, 117 households and 102 villagers, two cottagers, three knights, two slaves and a priest – a sizeable place for 1086.

Trees outnumbered people. The medieval manor boasted a 100-hectare (250-acre) deer park in Pinner. The name of Harrow Weald derives from the Old English for woodland, a reference to the Forest of Middlesex that once stretched from Houndsditch in the City of London, through Highgate and Mill Hill, to these outer reaches. It provided pannage (autumn feeding) for 20,000 pigs.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Harrow attracted gentry, who could easily reach court and parliament by coach and four. The wealthy landowner John Lyon founded Harrow school by royal charter in 1572.

On an 1868 map, Harrow on the Hill is a mere scattering of houses surrounded by parks, groves and school fields. The only nearby railway line is the London and North Western, arrowing away to Birmingham and Crewe. In 1930, there was enough greenery and wildlife to inspire Harrovian Tom Harrisson (later involved in the Mass-Observation project) to publish Birds of the Harrow District.

Metro-land would, by the 1950s, submerge the hill and its environs in housing, lasso it to London, spawn North, West and South Harrows and other subdistricts, and provide suburban living for more than 200,000 people. A more populous, less planned version of this greeted me when I moved there in the summer of 1987, to travel, as Betjeman puts it, “Smoothly from Harrow” on the Metropolitan line “fasts” to a dreary office job in Blackfriars.

Knowing, now, a little about this lost town’s historical layers helps explain the still tangible sacrificial feel of the place, the amorphous sensation of inhabiting a populous nowhere.
Things to see and do: walk section 9 of the Capital Ring; Headstone Manor Museum; Zoroastrian Centre (former Ace Cinema).

Clitheroe

I recommend a slow approach to Clitheroe, to take in the setting. A walk into town allows time to admire the hill, the steep-sided lump on which sit the ruins of the Norman castle, with the “second smallest surviving stone keep in England”. From the top of the hill, the views are uplifting: weather coming in from the west, the Bowland Fells, slivers of Yorkshire’s Three Peaks, Pendle Hill.

The A59 Lancs-Yorks trunk road became a bypass at the end of the 1960s. Before then, cars and vans chugged up Moor Lane and along Castle Street, which remain the traffic-cluttered sections of the high street. The narrowness and low-slung 17th– and 18th-century shopfronts remind me, in a way, of Totnes, which is largely Tudor. There was a continuity to towns into the modern era, warped by redbrick Victorian pomp and finally shattered by the 20th-century’s brutal raze-and-redevelop wave of shopping precincts (many of them since condemned).

In some respects, Clitheroe is archetypal Lancashire. The struggling one-time textile boomtowns to the south of Pendle Hill show what industry did and offshoring took away. Clitheroe, relatively speaking, is intact. Old places seem to weather booms and busts better. New money helps, of course.

There were factories here, though. Two former spinning blocks, a weaving shed and offices have been given a creditable makeover to create Holmes Mill: a combined deli-cum-bar, “luxury” cinema, brewery and alehouse, hotel and wedding venue, ticking aspirational boxes for affluent Lancastrians. Lively local boozers are dotted all around town, and Camra groups are probably Clitheroe’s main excursionists. The New Inn is riotously cosy. Georgeonzola does cheese and wine. There are three cocktail bars, at least. No clogs or caps there.

I live a couple of miles outside Clitheroe. It’s sometimes strange to think it belongs to the same county as St Helens and Warrington, where I was born and raised. Locals say “Pennine Lancashire”. I’m from the Plains. The rain is worse here, and the wind can be evil, but this north-facing town is a likable knot of streets and stonework; plenty to discover, still.
Things to see and do: Edisford Bridge (a swimming spot in summer); walk up Pendle Hill or on the Ribble Way (ideal for winter); Whalley Abbey (by bus or train); the No 11 bus to Bowland and for Pen-y-ghent.

Princetown

Devon is the least bleak county I know. It has balmy summers, rolling pastures of red earth and green grass, cove-serrated coasts, hamlets, high hedgerows and long lanes, an ecclesiastical city, a maritime city, and mild winters. Princetown is its sole flirtation with grim. Tourists do come, and not as seldom as other spots in this series, but they often look shocked when they get out of their cars or dismount their bikes.

The granite-grey Dartmoor prison is the dominant feature of Princetown, as well as the township’s reason for being. Thomas Tyrwhitt MP secured land from the Duchy estate of the Prince of Wales to establish a “depot” for prisoners taken in the Napoleonic wars. It was remote enough to deter escape and sufficiently inhospitable.

The first prisoners arrived in 1809 and soon Princetown prison was overcrowded. When US prisoners from the war of 1812 began arriving, conditions deteriorated, and diseases such as pneumonia, typhoid and smallpox became “natural” death sentences. The Depot closed when the conflicts ended, reopening in 1850 as a penal establishment for “common criminals” – which included, over time, the future Irish premier Éamon de Valera, the conscientious objector and MP Frank Longden and Zen poet Reginald Horace Blyth.

Tyrwhitt – now Sir Thomas – built a railway to shift quarry stone down to the port and bring up farm produce, coal, timber and lime for fertiliser. Prisoners and passengers used the line at various times until its closure in 1956. The prison was temporarily closed in 2024, due to “higher than normal” levels of radon, a cancer-causing gas formed by decaying uranium in rocks and soils.

The old railway is now a track down which runners and cyclists hurtle away from Dartmoor’s anti-twee, anti-wild camping, anti-tourism, possibly radioactive town, or “village”, by population if not for its looks. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stayed at the Duchy hotel, now the national park visitor centre. An escaped convict, Selden, has a pivotal role in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Between two farmhouses called High Tor and Foulmire and the great prison “extends the desolate, lifeless moor. This, then is the stage upon which tragedy has played, and upon which we may help to play it again.” For the modern, leisure-age gaze, the moor is a wild camping backdrop and, at least potentially, full of vitality, thanks to its airy solitudes; HMP Dartmoor in Princetown, emptied for now, is the tragic set.
Things to see and do: Princetown to Burrator Reservoir mountain bike tracks; Dartmoor Prison Museum; Foggintor Quarry.

Chris Moss’s latest book, Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County That Made The Modern World, is published by Old Street Publishing at £25. His book based on this series, Where Tourists Seldom Tread will be published by Faber in 2026