Mile Markers: plain, exact notes for a night or two off the M4

A mile marker on the motorway tells you precisely where you are and nothing more, and that is the standard these notes try to keep. Each one answers a question guests actually send the desk. Which Windsor rooms look straight at the castle and which only catch a tower past a chimney. How long to book when dinner is a twenty minute drive. Which M4 exit leads to which hotel, and why the train to Heathrow goes east before it goes west.

The ground they cover runs from Maidenhead and the Bray tables in the west, through Burnham and the town centre of Slough, to Langley, Colnbrook and the Terminal 5 edge of Heathrow in the east, with Windsor, Eton and Datchet along the river to the south. Most readers are here for a night or two rather than a lifetime, so distances are given in minutes and the notes assume you have a hotel room, a free evening and no wish to waste either.

The first ten markers take in the castle facing rooms, dinner in Bray, Windsor after ten, the three ways to Heathrow without a car, the M4 junctions, a working week on the trading estate, a fair account of Slough itself and Burnham Beeches when the woods turn in October, with two practical notes on what changes for a first booking out here and how long to book in each postcode. More follow through the autumn and winter.

Hotels, restaurants and pubs are named because guests use them. None has paid to appear and none has any arrangement with this desk. Where a detail changes often, such as opening hours or the way a restaurant takes bookings, the note says so rather than print something that will be wrong by spring. The only prices here are our own, and they match rates to the pound, from £250 for an hour to £1,800 for an overnight. Browse Who Is On or By Look, read every one of the Call Outs, and when the plan is set, booking explains the four lines to send Etta.