Shrivenham Bowls Club

The bowling green at Shrivenham is the sort of place you stumble across while wandering around Oxfordshire and think: why haven't I done this before? It's a proper community club, the kind where regulars have been rolling woods on the same patch of grass for decades. The greens are immaculate - the groundskeeping is taken seriously here - and there's something genuinely meditative about lawn bowls if you give it a go.

You'll need to ring ahead to find out about visitor play, as it's not a walk-in public venue. Most clubs welcome visitors, though sometimes there are specific evenings set aside or membership requirements. The beauty of bowls is that it's not arduous - you can play for an hour or three hours, and you set the pace. It suits anyone from eight to eighty, really, though the regulars tend to be the retired brigade who've perfected their technique over years.

If you're staying at Faringdon Grange, which is less than four miles away, and you've had enough of the usual park activities, a trip to Shrivenham for an afternoon on the green is a decent alternative. It's not a tourist attraction in the traditional sense - there's no shop, no tearoom, no gift shop - but that's precisely why it works. You get a genuine glimpse of English village life doing what it's done for generations. Worth the detour if you're curious about how locals actually spend their time.