Richard Hammond has lovingly called a Lake District village his favourite place on the planet in a new YouTube video.
The former Top Gear presenter filmed the video tour in Buttermere and shared some heartfelt stories and thoughts on the village.
The video was posted to What’s Next, a YouTube channel spearheaded by Hammond alongside Jeremy Clarkson and James May, and explores several significant areas of the village and water that hold memories for the star.
In the video, he said: “I have been a very lucky boy and have travelled an awful lot of the world, and all the time I’ve travelled it the one place I took with me in my imagination and heart was Buttermere in the Lake District.
“In fact, it became a bit of a standing joke, because what you won’t have seen in our many car and adventure travel shows over the years is that wherever we were looking out across a beautiful landscape whether it be Madagascar, Mongolia or Burma there’d be a pause in the radio traffic from the rest of the crew in their cars and someone would chime in ‘go on then Rich, say it’ and I’d pipe up with ‘it reminds me of the Lake District.'”
After travelling the world and filming cars for over 20 years, Hammond achieved his self-proclaimed life-long dream of buying a house in the village in 2020 with wife Mindy Hammond and their two daughters.
Speaking with The Telegraph in 2020, he also called the Bridge Hotel in Buttermere his favourite pub in the world.
Talking in the video about his youth in the village, he added: “I first discovered this place for myself when I was 17 and I’d been thrown out of sixth form college and I was walking coast to coast with my dog just for something to do and this was my last stop on my journey from across the country.
“As I walked into it I fell in love with immediately and I’ve been coming back ever since. Maybe you’ll appreciate and understand it or think I am nuts and wonder why I didn’t choose somewhere sunny to fall in love with.
“But as a 17-year-old struggling to get to grips with the world, wondering what am I going to do with my life, what am I going to be and what’s going to happen to me, lying and listening to the beck and the water coming down from the fells, It was an education. It still connects with me as directly as it did then. The Lake District is in my heart, it’s utterly magnificent.”
