Taking the High Road Across Britain : A relaxing, self-drive tour of England, Scotland and Wales begins with lots of astute planning.

It takes more work than most realize to travel well.

I want to see and visit all the best places, and to move with minimum stress, at a measured pace, through interesting spaces in between. I want, as much as possible, to avoid traffic and other tourists, and to encounter amiable locals. I want to eat and drink well, but not too well. On the trip through Britain I am about to describe, my wife and I met a couple from Cheshire who had moved from their country inn in Yorkshire to ours, because they found the food at the first much too good.

I am decades past the cycling and backpacking stages, and have grown fond of certain creature comforts. My horizons are now essentially limited to Europe and the United States, where driving a dependable car of your own is, I find, the best way (unless you cycle or hike) to thread yourself into the weave and density of the land.

If you’re in Europe for more than 30 days, the Renault people offer an attractive sale-and-buy arrangement, by which you get a brand-new car, waiting near the dock or the airport, for half the cost of renting a car others have already used. Having decided on your basic locale (I’ve followed this same scheme for Italy, Germany and France), and arranged for your wheels, you must next make a major effort--before you leave home--plotting things to see, routes to drive and places to stop.

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I tend to choose the things I want to see from general knowledge, friends and serious books and articles (about art, architecture, history, the region generally) rather than from commercial travel guides: For one thing, all those fellow tourists I’m trying to avoid are probably reading the same guides. Having enjoyed a short holiday among the great houses of Derbyshire and the moors, dales and ruined abbeys of Yorkshire a few years ago, I decided to start by more or less repeating it, trying to refine away errors of the past. After the proud ruins of Whitby Abbey on its bluff over the sea, my wife and I would continue north to Durham (for the cathedral) and the castles of the Northumberland coast, which I had never seen; cross over the Lammermoor hills to the Firth of Forth, in order to stop somewhere near Edinburgh; zip down the northwest side of England (using the M6 to slip between Liverpool and Manchester; I try to avoid motorways while on vacation except for such purposes) for a few days in the Lake District, then drive into northern and western Wales for more castles and the hotel-village of Portmeirion--a brightly colored fantasy town, used 25 years ago as the setting for Patrick McGoohan’s TV series “The Prisoner.” Finally, we would cross Wales to Shrewsbury and Hereford, drive down the Wye Valley to Tintern Abbey, and over the Cotswolds to home--home, temporarily, being Oxford.

By way of the British Automobile Assn.’s guide to “Stately Homes, Museums, Castles, and Gardens,” I identified about 20 places we might wish to stop and look over, and added a few churches and cathedrals. I took it for granted we would discover perfect villages, unlisted ruins and welcoming lunchtime pubs all along the way. My wife was looking for ruins to photograph, and we found that a couple of glasses of wine (or beer) and a “ploughman’s lunch”--a big hunk of fresh bread with butter and a slab of local cheese, along with pickled onions and salad, at about $6 total--was usually sufficient for our midday break, since one overeats so in Britain at breakfast and dinner.

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Driving British byroads is a sport for hardy auto pilots, ideally teamed with alert navigators who can read maps and decipher odd road signs often hidden in the ivy. After a while, my wife began to keep a list of the signs: “Blind Summits.” “Red Squirrels in Road.” “Experimental Anti-Dazzle Scheme.” “Road subject to subsidence (sinking).” “Oncoming vehicles in middle of roadway.” “Cleaning gulleys.” “Articulated lorries entering.” “Rare poultry collection.” In most of Wales, all official road signs are printed first in Welsh (“Gwasanaesthou/Services”), which can be distracting when you’re driving past complex directions at rapid speeds.

However much care you take, however, you will lose your way from time to time--key turnoffs go unmarked, roundabout symbols sometimes defy visual logic. But relax: The place you get lost to may turn out to be even more enjoyable than the one you were seeking.

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The last part of advance planning involves choosing places to eat and spend the night. British bookstores are piled high with hotel guides (pub guides, restaurant guides, B&B; guides, inn guides). I’ve come to depend on one called “Egon Ronay’s Hotels and Restaurants in Great Britain and Ireland” (St. Martin’s Press, $19.95), even though Mr. Ronay himself no longer owns or edits it. His, or his successors’ standards are very tough, if sometimes quirky. Only 38 British hotels outside of London earned from them a “deluxe” rating of 80 or higher in the 1991 edition; only 48 non-London restaurants merited Ronay Guide stars.

After planning a first draft of my route and my probable stops (of two or three nights, when possible), I locate the reasonably priced Ronay-rated country house hotels (converted manor houses, often in acres of parkland) or agreeable-sounding inns along my way, all of which offer guests breakfast and dinner, and often other amenities as well. I then write, weeksahead, to two or three hostelries in each likely stopping place. I compare rates and brochures and, having made my choices, send off deposit checks. (I keep small bank accounts in the countries I visit or order things from, which enables me to write checks in the local currency. I recommend this for regular travelers--it simplifies transactions wonderfully. You may object to paying the cost of unearned interest and unusual fees, but these are sometimes made up for by the rising value of other people’s money against the dollar.)

It is the inns and country house hotels, as much as Castles Howard or Caernarfon or the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, as much as Windermere or Bodnant gardens or the great bridges over the Forth (all of which we enjoyed), that can be the real delight of a self-designed vacation. We stayed at nine Ronay-rated hotels, all told, from pompous castles and stately homes (which retain much of their original aspect) to a stonewalled village inn overlooking the town pond, and a fussy old farmhouse amid Welsh hills covered with heather and gorse, where red-stained sheep ambled all over the yard. Their Ronay ratings ran from 58 to 77, their daily charges (including huge cooked breakfasts, and three- or four-course dinners with a bottle of good wine) from about $100 to $250 for two.

Breakfasts at these places can be as spare or as copious as you wish. I risked smoked fish twice, decided against oatmeal porridge served in Scotland with whiskey and cream, and usually settled for a simple table of juice, fruit, sausage and bacon, eggs, black (i.e., blood) pudding, fried bread, tomato and mushrooms, and toast, some of which my wife spirited into her bag to help fill out our pub lunches.

The home-cooked dinners at these relatively small (usually about 12- to 20-room) country hotels offer a choice of half a dozen starters (melon, pate, fresh garden soups, mushrooms, avocados and artichokes, kidneys, prawns; smoked salmon was everywhere); main courses of local lamb, venison, chicken, duckling, game hen and all sorts of fish. With all these came, without fail, a side dish filled with two kinds of potato and three kinds of vegetables. A few chefs try oddball nouveau-French combinations and decorated plates. At the end, a giant trolley of “puddings” is rolled up (or, in crowded places, described), six or more great tarts or gooey homemade desserts. Sharp red currants were ubiquitous last fall. Coffee is served in the lounge, or lounges, where one is expected to make small talk with the other guests.

Some of them turn out to be fascinating, or at least very likable people. They’re almost all British, at least in the autumn. Foreign travelers seem not to have discovered this country’s family-owned country house hotels and inns, which is probably just as well. The few Americans we encountered--rich golfers in Scotland, rich doctors in Wales--could be heard bragging and braying across the greatest of Great Halls.

If you do ever decide to travel through Britain in this independent, upper-middle-class way, make polite noises over and over, greet everyone you meet, and for heaven’s sake, keep your voice down. That way you can listen in on other people’s conversations, which can be priceless.