I investigated the UK's most overwhelmed village - what locals put up with is shocking

The UK is covered in stunning little villages, which often represent the best that its green and pleasant land has to offer. The Cotswolds is viewed by some as having the most beautiful landscape in the country - an incredibly competitive field. Incidentally, it's my belief that the most picturesque scenes are found not in England, but across the border in Wales. That's by the by, however. In this instance, I'm talking about Castle Combe in Wiltshire, which is only about a 12-mile drive away from King Charles and Queen Camilla's pad at Highgrove. I dropped by recently to talk to residents about what life is like living alongside huge droves of tourists - thought to amount to 150,000 a year.

Most residents were unwilling to be named, and none wanted their photo taken. On these jobs, us pesky journos are always tasked with including faces in our stories, which ensures our pieces are more real and relatable. Readers don't like being confronted with just blocks of text and photos of general local views. I would ordinarily feel quite frustrated and dissatisfied when leaving without headshots, but on this occasion, I empathised with locals wanting to guard as much of their privacy as they could.

I was told about some frankly staggering rudeness displayed by some tourists, including allegations that residents had been photographed through their windows.

Visitors also reportedly knock on people's doors, and are shocked when the door opens, and it turns out that someone actually lives there.

One local told me that they treat the settlement like a part of Disneyland. I was left feeling uneasy at the amount of coaches and cars parking up in what was really a very small place, where, as the chair of the parish council, Fred Winup, pointed out to me, there is not that much to see.

It seems that a number of people from overseas think that Britain is exactly like it is in the films and TV shows set in the UK that they are fed, which paint the country as a perfect place filled with chocolate box villages and friendly inhabitants only too willing to invite you in for some tea.

In fact, I would argue that Britons are amongst the most private people in the world, and are inclined to guard their own space more than most.

An Englishman's home is his castle, after all, and they will seldom tolerate curious peepers.

At one point, I saw what seemed to be a couple from the US. "So pretty," one of them remarked. "Look at the garden," the other added. "Stunning."

The woman then approached the front door of a house and sniffed the flowers growing on its front.

Many Americans will be used to quite large front gardens and porches between the road and their usually massive homes, and so the prospect of someone coming up to their property and doing the same perhaps didn't even cross their minds.

"Give us a little bit of consideration," Hilary Baker, 69, a former police officer and bed and breakfast owner, told visitors.

Using a wonderfully British turn of phrase, she added that the situation, including the village having drones flown over it, is "now beyond reasonable".

She also told me that people ask to come into her house for a look around. I mean, would that request even pass through the mind of someone with all their faculties intact anywhere else?

Castle Combe is undeniably pretty, and that clearly has a bamboozling effect that means people don't act entirely normally.

It is by no means the only place in Britain struggling with intrusive tourists, and a lot of these locations will have been places visited for decades.

But it seems that, especially post-Covid, the sheer number of people swinging by has dramatically increased. Places across the country that used to largely function for centuries as simply the homes of small communities seemed to have, slowly and inadvertantly in most cases, turned into products.

This, combined with dwindling awareness displayed by sometimes entitled tourists of the impact they are having on the area they are enjoying, is a disruptive combination.

I am as guilty as anybody of my generation (Generation Z, if you're interested) wanting to show off on my Instagram story and visit lots of lovely places to share pictures of.

But surely this can be done compassionately and more tactfully than we are seeing at the moment.

What goes through some people's heads often baffles me, and hearing about what individuals think is appropriate to do in Castle Combe is one of a growing number of occasions when I have found myself lost for words.