If you re after the fluffiest roasties and the most delicious gravy, then look no further than this handy hot list of 12 Sunday lunch hot spots in Gloucestershire..
I'm deep inside the Forest of Dean – a former royal hunting ground in Herefordshire popular with the Tudors – in search of watery wildlife. It's a crisp April morning and the sky is piercingly blue. Ancient oaks cloaked in ivy and moss seem sprung from a fairytale. The forest floor is blanketed in bluebells and dog's mercury. Cherry blossom falls silently like snow. I stop to munch on a lilac cuckooflower – affectionately known as 'lady's smock' – which has the same fiery flavour as wasabi. Having recently relocated from North Africa, blackcaps – the nightingale of the north – are singing in the trees with full-throated ease. From the corner of her eye, one of our group spots a questing bank vole passing feather-footed through the plashy fen, much to the delight of our guide, Ed Drewitt, an ebullient naturalist with a PhD in peregrines and a limitless passion for all things furry and feathered. I feel like William Boot in Scoop researching his