Gentle

Wide skies, gentle footpaths through gold and copper wooded hills, thatched cottages, cosy pubs and quirky shops: the Lincolnshire Wolds have all the ingredients for the perfect autumnal mini break. Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson lived in the village of Somersby for most of his first three decades and the local landscapes echo through his verses. In The Lady of Shalott: “Long fields of barley and of rye / That clothe the wold and meet the sky …”

The Lincolnshire Wolds National Landscape covers an area of 216 sq miles. On its southern boundary, halfway between Lincoln and the coast, the friendly market town of Horncastle bills itself as the “gateway to the Wolds”. With handsome brick houses, great cafes, a market on Thursdays and Saturdays and decent public transport links, it’s a perfect base for exploring the area.

Horncastle overflows with antique shops. Laurence Shaw, with half a century’s knowledge of the trade, runs an elegant wholesaler on the corner of East Street. In an old chapel across the road, the Trinity Centre has all kinds of ancient treasures piled in fantastical heaps under lancets of Victorian glass: porcelain milkmaids, jelly moulds, cotton reels, teetering piles of teacups and thick vines of jewellery. Round the corner in Stanhope Antique Centre you may find anything from a wooden decoy duck to a roulette wheel between chandeliers and grandfather clocks.

By the “Ducks Crossing!” sign opposite Tesco, mallards gather on the reedy River Bain. And in the 13th-century St Mary’s church there are gold angels in the rafters and lines from Tennyson’s poem Ring out, wild bells in stained glass. The new Riverscape Walk, launched last year, will take you past the canal basin, watermill and former leather tanning warehouses.

Take a hike

There are plenty of rewarding walks nearby and you don’t always need a car to reach them. The hourly 56 bus from Lincoln to Skegness stops in Horncastle and, 10 minutes later, in Hagworthingham, a peaceful Wold-edge village. From here, a six-mile loop of undulating lanes and footpaths takes in tiny Somersby, Tennyson’s birthplace, and Bag Enderby (which sounds straight out of Tolkien), where St Margaret’s church has an intricate 15th-century font, carved with religious symbols and medieval scenes. Bag Enderby’s -by suffix comes from an Old Norse word for village.

From Hagworthingham, you can also stroll through Snipe Dales nature reserve, where a 3-metre (10ft) wooden snipe, carved by local sculptor Nigel Sardeson, has just been installed on a wooded bank. The valleys here are fragrant with late meadowsweet and water mint and the trees are full of birdsong, from tiny goldcrests in the conifers to huge buzzards over the oaks. If you have time and energy to spare, the Viking Way long-distance walk – waymarked with horned Viking helmets – runs through Horncastle and the Wolds on its 149-mile journey from Rutland Water to the Humber.

Don’t miss

In Horncastle, the Joseph Banks Centre multitasks as a tourist info point, local museum and natural history hub. Banks, a botanist and Horncastle’s most famous inhabitant, sailed with Captain Cook and oversaw the creation of Kew Gardens. The museum courtyard is bright with hydrangeas, which Banks helped introduce into Britain.

The Edwardian village of Woodhall Spa, six miles from Horncastle, has wide leafy avenues and smart black-and-white buildings; even the public loos next to the Tory club are half timbered. Nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, digging for coal, found instead a source of mineral-rich water, a magnet for the era’s wellness-seekers. I meander past the Dambusters memorial and mural, the thriving Kinema in the Woods, opened in 1922, the nearby Tea House and Cottage Museum, then back to Horncastle along the sculpture-dotted Viking Way.

Where to eat

Horncastle’s top lunch spots include the cafe at Myers Bakery, fragrant with spice and yeast, where you can buy Lincolnshire plum loaf. Round the corner, the spacious and welcoming bike-themed Pedal and Paws serves pizzas, salads and cakes. No 8 Coffee Shop, which opened in March 2026, is already popular for inventive hot drinks such as cinnamon-bun matcha and pistachio hot chocolate.

Montebello, in the former Angel Inn, serves home-cooked Italian food, while Magpies offers refined white linen and candlelight dining, with dishes such as Grimsby crab linguine or loin of Lincolnshire lamb. Magpies also has rooms, in cottages next to a Tardis-like guitar shop.

Where to stay

The cheerful, timeworn Admiral Rodney Hotel is right in the middle of Horncastle, with affordable rooms and details you might see in pricier places: speedy wifi, retro radio, Twinings teabags. It offers great veggie breakfast options, fresh fruit and pastries, served in a big glass-walled conservatory with peacock fanlights. Dinner dishes such as pan-fried sea bass with pickled fennel, or sticky date pudding with butterscotch sauce, chicly garnished with edible flowers and micro-herbs, make a celebratory end to days spent hiking through the Wolds.

Getting there and around

The 56 bus heads to Horncastle from Lincoln bus station hourly and takes 50 minutes. The less frequent 30 bus takes 10 minutes longer and winds through warm-stoned villages. Local buses include the new B617 from Horncastle to Woodhall Spa. The coast is 20 miles away, on a bus with top-deck views across the Wolds.

Accommodation was provided by the Admiral Rodney, doubles from around £100, room only. Train travel was provided by LNER

The contest, which is in its 12th year, celebrates the resilience of the 2,200 brown bears that live in the preserve on the Alaska Peninsula.

After a week of fierce competition, Backpack emerged victorious as Fat Bear Week champion, the heftiest bear in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve.

The nonprofit running the longstanding contest announced on Tuesday that the bear, known for his pacifist nature, was the winner with more than 100,000 votes, giving him a close win over Bear 910 with just over 50 percent of the poll.

The contest, which is in its 12th year, celebrates the resilience of the 2,200 brown bears that live in the preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, which extends from the state’s southwest corner towards the Aleutian Islands. Fat Bear Week was started in 2014 as an interactive way to inform the public about brown bears, the coastal cousins of grizzlies.

Last year’s winner, Chunk — known officially as Bear 32 — clinched his victory at an estimated 1,200 pounds. He was handily defeated in the first round of competition this year by Bucky, who went on to lose a face-off against Backpack, known officially as Bear 89.

The event this year featured 16 bears vying for the heavyweight title in a single-elimination, bracket-style tournament. All voting is done online, and the winner was declared on Tuesday evening after the final poll closed. The public could watch the bears on explore.org’s livestream cameras before deciding on their favourite.

“Fat bears are successful bears,” the nonprofit says on its website. These bears gorge themselves on the abundant salmon that return to the Brooks River starting in late June. It is there that they can stuff themselves to accumulate the fat reserves they will need to survive the winter. To be featured in the contest, the bears must frequent the area around the river.

Son of ex-champion

Backpack is the son of former Fat Bear Week champion Holly, who introduced him to the Brooks River when he was a first-year cub in 2006. His name was inspired by his habit of climbing onto his mother’s back when they swam the river. This year’s fans cheered on Backpack in the contest’s Instagram comments, noting his lineage and reputation as a gentle giant.

“Unlike many large adult male bears, Backpack hasn’t shown much aggression toward his competitors,” his contestant profile reads.

Backpack uses his “quiet strength” rather than brawling and is often seen in wildlife cameras sitting on a rock downstream, appearing to take in the scenery around him.

He defeated Bear 910, who is also the daughter of a former champion: 409 Beadnose.

Adult male brown bears typically weigh between 600 and 900 pounds (270-410kg) in midsummer. By the time they are ready to hibernate after feasting on migrating and spawning salmon, large males can weigh more than 1,000 pounds (454kg). Females are about one-third smaller. Bears may each eat as many as 30 fish a day this time of year, working hard to eat a year’s worth of food in about six months.

During winter hibernation, bears do not eat or drink and can lose one-third of their body weight.

Fat Bear Week’s contestants also included five bear families, in recognition of the record-high number of families and cubs at the river this summer. A mother must feed and protect her cubs while also eating enough calories to sustain herself through hibernation. Cubs often face the risk of attack from other bears due to territorialism or food scarcity.

Bear 132 and her three spring cubs advanced to the semifinals, but lost out to Bear 910.

She has become one of the largest and most experienced mother bears at Brooks River, according to her contestant profile. In mid-July, one of her cubs became separated from the family for several days, wandering the river corridor alone. The cub was reunited with the family a few days later.