Big Lane

I was in Beaufort, Breconshire the other day, collecting a car – as you do – when I stumbled upon a sight so quintessentially British it ought to come with its own brass band and commemorative biscuit tin. Two roads, side by side. One called Big Lane. The other – wait for it – Small Lane.

No marketing fluff. No “Heol y Lili” or “Royal Crescent”. Just: that one’s big, that one’s small. Straight-talking, unpretentious, and quietly magnificent.

And where does this vision of honest signage unfold? In Beaufort, naturally – a village named for the Duke of Beaufort, part-time aristocrat, full-time landlord, and fully paid-up beneficiary of the British class system.

Now here’s the thing: the Beauforts were originally the bastard offspring of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, and his long-time mistress (later wife) Katherine Swynford. Their children were later legitimised by royal decree and given the name Beaufort, after a French castle John happened to own. Fast-forward a few generations and the head of the family becomes the Duke of Somerset – fighting on the wrong side of the Wars of the Roses and getting himself killed for it. A surviving offshoot – a younger or “cadet” branch – eventually adopted Somerset as their surname and were rewarded with a new title in 1682: Duke of Beaufort. So, to summarise: the original Beauforts became Dukes of Somerset, then a branch of the Somersets became Dukes of Beaufort, swapping names like it was a game of aristocratic pass the parcel. They're all the same dynastic spaghetti – Beaufort by blood, Somerset by name, and titled whichever way the monarchy fancied at the time.

And here’s the real cherry on top: Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, got his claim to the throne through none other than Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. So the Tudors themselves were built on the back of this legitimised-but-barred bloodline. Which makes today’s Dukes of Beaufort very distant cousins of the Tudors – and arguably more royal than half the current peerage, if your standards for monarchy include strategic shagging and looking the other way when the paperwork gets awkward.

The current Duke, Henry FitzRoy Somerset, only recently inherited the title – and has openly admitted he doesn’t actually know how much land he owns. He’s “engaged in a process of finding out,” which, in this context, means combing through deeds, trusts, and ancient entitlements to uncover just how many fields, hillsides, and rental opportunities the family forgot they had. And once found, you can be sure they’ll be monetised. Because in today’s aristocracy, the foxes are optional – but the yield must be robust.

Meanwhile, the people of Beaufort name their roads Big Lane and Small Lane. No airs. No need to flatter. Just: how wide is the road? That’ll do. It’s democratic, unpretentious, and, frankly, a breath of fresh air in a landscape still titled and taxed by medieval leftovers.

Of course, it’s hard to avoid the other form of deference – the Beaufort Arms. Every other pub in South Wales seems to be named after the very family that owns the land beneath the pool table. It’s like calling every launderette “The House of Windsor Wash & Fold” and pretending it’s patriotic.

Just up the road from me, at Badminton House, sits the Duke himself – surrounded by manicured lawns, oil paintings of dead relatives, and no doubt a dedicated accounts team for extracting every last penny of ground rent. The estate’s crowning glory, of course, is the annual Badminton Horse Trials – where wealth, breeding, and tweed collide in a high-speed display of controlled privilege. If there’s a more photogenic symbol of land-based inherited wealth monetising the countryside under the guise of sport, I’ve yet to see it.

And so Britain rolls on. Still naming villages after aristocrats. Still letting people with titles they didn’t earn and land they didn’t buy treat the country like it’s one big legacy asset. But at least in Beaufort, Breconshire, the people still know the difference between Big and Small – and they don’t pretend otherwise. Which is more than can be said for Westminster.

Big Lane. Small Lane. And somewhere in between – a bloody great estate, a horse trial, and a peer trying to locate the rest of his income on a map.