My regular drives to The Mill at Sonning, where an excellent production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Ten Times Table is currently on view (see Weekend), invariably take me, whichever route is adopted, through the Chiltern Hills.

Among the loveliest parts of Oxfordshire – with their chalk spine extending through Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire to Hertfordshire – the hills have been rated an Area of Outstanding Beauty since 1965.

Their special character is highlighted by Jill Eyers in an enjoyable new book, Chilterns at Work, published by Amberley Press at £14.99.

Dr Eyers proves an ideal guide, well-qualified for the task as the director of Chiltern Archaeology, who leads many courses and walks through the area. She also lectures for the Open University and Oxford University Department of Continuing Education.

Early in the book, she observes that the region, like many others, has evolved a reputation for the supply of certain products. There is a pleasingly alliterative quality in the names of the ones she lists.

“Where would the Chilterns be,” she asks, “without a good income from things as diverse as chalk, chairs and cherries, bricks and bodgers, pigs and prunes, watercress and windmills, just to mention a few examples of classic products from the region.”

Tighter editing might have given that sentence the final question mark it requires and removed the windmills and bodgers (chair makers) that are clearly not ‘products’ as we perceive them.

Dr Eyers observes later on that many of the traditional trades of the region are reflected in the names of its pubs. She cites as examples The Brickmakers’ Arms, The Carpenters’ Arms, The Chairmakers’ Arms, The Dog and Badger and The Crooked Billet.

The last is a pub I pass close to on what is my favourite route of the four (at least) available on those journeys from Oxford to Sonning (and I do hope that George and Amal Clooney have discovered it since their recent move there).

This avoids Reading, Henley and Nettlebed, which Dr Eyers reminds us was until the late 1800s a major centre of brick production, very different from the quaint mecca for antique hunters that it is today.

Instead, you take a right turn from the A4130 after Nuffield, where the shut-up Crown is one of a number of forlorn reminders in that area of pubs that were.

Then it’s on to Stoke Row, passing the Maharajah’s Well – that astonishing provision for an English village, gifted by the Maharajah of Benares in 1864 – and on past The Cherry Tree pub, before a plunge into the green canopy of the beech woods.

The name of The Cherry Tree, which happily still thrives today, celebrates one of the Chiltern products I mentioned earlier.

Here it was that a lavish lunch was served on February 27, 1872, during a day of festivities marking the recovery of HRH The Prince of Wales from a severe attack of typhoid.

Everything was funded by the munificent maharajah who made regular gifts to the village on royal occasions. This time all 149 cottages in the parish received half a pound of tea, a pound of sugar, two loaves of bread, two pounds of bacon and a pair of good blankets.

Stoke Row has its second pub in The Crooked Billet, a name again associated with a village occupation. Billets were pieces of wood used by those chairmaking bodgers at work in the beech woods.

These days under landlord Paul Clerehugh, the pub has a fine reputation for food, with lobsters regularly on the menu. Here it was that local girl Kate Winslet and her guests ate bangers and mash in celebration of her marriage to film director Jim Threapleton in 1998.

How different the Titanic star would have found it had she visited in the 1970s when, still the domain of the legendary landlord Nobby Harris, it was famously the scruffiest pub in the country.

It had no bar, no cash register, no cooker and as a result certainly no food. Chickens pecked among the ancient furnishings of the ‘bar parlour’, where Nobby lolled as in the picture above, leaving customers to help themselves to beer (Brakspear’s). This was so good as consistently to earn the pub a place in the Good Beer Guide.

FOLK who go to the Edinburgh Festival might conceivably want to read about it, but most of those who don’t won’t.

Such has been my view over many decades during the August glut of reviews and reports from this less-than-riveting cultural event (I think especially of its Fringe).

As an ‘all-aboard-the-gravy-train’ opportunity for the media, it out-performs even ghastly ‘Glasto’, from which mercifully we have been spared this year.

The wall-to-wall coverage of Edinburgh across newspaper arts pages, and the oodles on radio too, can be explained by the fact that there was little else on the cultural front, aside from the BBC Proms.

The Oxford Times used to go in for it too, with the arts editor of my early days annually heading north to report on student contributions to the Fringe.

Since these famously included on one occasion a group with Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, there was, I suppose, some point to the jaunt. It just didn’t appeal to me.

Another August newspaper curiosity that has long irritated me is the disappearance on holidays, all at the same time, of many of each rag’s star columnists.

These are big names paid big salaries on the presumption we want to read them. It’s a cheat on readers when they all depart at once.

Last Friday, the Daily Mail, for instance, was without its biggest name Richard Littlejohn (‘Back on Tuesday’), ‘Mr Family Man’ Tom Utley, show-biz specialist Baz Bamigboye, film critic Brian Viner, theatre critic Quentin Letts and once-a-week ‘Glenda Slagg’ Jan Moir.

In most cases there were substitutes. But are we not entitled to more of the real thing?

ALL who know Tom Bateman – and quite a lot of us in Oxford do – will be delighted to see his translation to first-division celebrity through his role in ITV’s new production of Vanity Fair, which starts on Sunday.

The former Cherwell School pupil, now 29, was front page news in The Times on Saturday, in a photograph also featuring the star of this W.M. Thackeray adaptation, Olivia Cook.

She plays the scheming Becky Sharp and Tom her ill-fated husband Rawdon Crawley, a gentlemen not generously blessed with brains.

The photograph trailed an interview with Tom in the Saturday Review conducted by Andrew Billen, another Oxford chap as it happens.

The picture caption mentioned that the drama “was created by the makers of Poldark”, the inference being that it might be offering something of the ‘phwoar’ factor associated with the Cornish caper.

If so, male pulchritude in the Aidan Turner mould would presumably be supplied by Tom.

Nothing of the sort was suggested, I am pleased to say, in the interview by Andrew, a journalist not given to the promotion of such silliness.

He did concede, though, what is very obvious to the eye, that Tom is indeed a handsome fellow.

As long ago as 2015, he was being hailed as “the new Ross Poldark” by Mail Online for his work in the title role – indeed roles – of ITV’s Jekyll and Hyde.

Some readers posted comments challenging this assertion.

Tom’s has been a steady ascent to stardom since his days as a leading figure on the Oxford amateur stage, with Shakespearian roles his forte.

A big break came at the close of his drama school days when he was given the important part of Claudio in a West End production of Much Ado About Nothing.

This starred David Tennant, giving Tom something of a “backsplash” in female attention at the stage door, as he told me over a drink at the time. The expression was new to me, and I thought it rather amusing.

Now he makes the splash himself.