Some friends took us for lunch today to Ulverscroft Grange, which provides excellent food and long-range views across the Leicestershire countryside. It is run by the Shuttlewood Clarke Foundation, a local charity, and also has a number of other features on the site, such as a garden that is looking resplendent in its summer glory.

It is also home to an amazing model railway set up, the kind that small children (and grown ups) dream of but rarely achieve. It is huge, filling most of a large room and running a complex network of tracks through two small villages, several stops and a rolling landscape. It needs some of the fields in the landscape to double as hatches for accessing areas you couldn’t begin to reach from the sides. At the same time though, it is packed with tiny details – not just buildings and trees but also miniature people caught up in all kinds of scenarios and a host of other things, like a flock of (teeny, tiny) geese in a farmyard or a car crashed into a post (surely an ironic comment on roads from enthusiasts for rail networks).

The railway is generally open on Fridays and Saturdays and is definitely worth a visit.