Coursing through the Cotswolds and Castle Coombe
(In Lower Slaughter, one of the most picturesque villages in the Cotswolds)
What does your mind conjure up when you hear the word Cotswolds? For me, thanks to marvelous memories of a most beauteous region, it has come to mean a clutch of medieval towns whose stone walls and homes are bathed in the warmest honeyed tones, of upscale antiques shops selling a tempting array of period silver, glass and English bone china, of curvaceous bridges spanning burbling brooks, of clock towers in wide central squares that date from the Middle Ages when wool was sold by weight in a thriving national trade.
Today, the medley of picture-perfect hamlets that make up the Cotswolds have become trendy, upscale Meccas for well-shod Londoners looking for luxury and anonymity far from the madding crowd. The are is best coursed by car and the town of Chipping Norton makes a good gateway through which this patchwork of fields, dales, dells, and villages may be explored. The very comfortable King’s Arms Bed & Breakfast in one of Chipping Norton’s quiet street was our stop for the night when Llew, Chriselle and I holidayed in the area.
“The Cotswolds” is the collective name given to a number of small villages and towns to be found in the middle of England where sheep farming once thrived and is still the main occupation. Indeed, during the medieval age, sheep selling and wool trading made the region richly prosperous and led to the creation of beautiful manors by the “wool merchants” who also endowed their local parish churches with their wealth in an attempt to “give back to the community”. The famous Cotswold wool, of course, derives its reputation from this region.
You cannot hurry on your exploration of the Costwolds. Nor can you have a set itinerary. Its best to go where the whim takes you, armed only with a road map that might suggest a route as you hop from one village to the other. There are no motorways to connect this web of villages. You will find yourself in narrow country lanes, some no wider than the width of your vehicle, passing by hedgerows buzzing with bees. Just when you begin to wonder what might happen if another vehicle should approach yours, the exact situation presents itself. Fortunately, the driver of the oncoming vehicle is far more experienced than you are at negotiating such sharply bending hairpin curves and he manages the feat without batting an eyelid. Once you do reach your destination, you will be best off on foot for the towns are walker-friendly and as you go from shop to church, from bridge to river bank, you will discover that your own two feet are your safest ally.
What is particularly remarkable about the Cotswolds is that entire villages and towns are constructed out of the local yellow stone which, over a period of several centuries, had been enriched with a golden grey patina that quite dazzles in the afternoon sunshine. Of course, if your trip includes the university town of Oxford in whose shadow the Cotswolds lie, you will discover the same honey-hued stone walls enclosing all the college buildings. Plentifully quarried in the region, this stone was used for everything from cottage construction to the creation of small dams over local rivers.
And then there is the British penchant for gardening, their love of ivy and wisteria which clings to every stone structure, their delight in roses and rosemary…and you have visual images that are hard to describe and scents that no perfumer can package. Sporting names that can be traced to their etymological and Anglo-Saxon roots, a tour of the Cotswold towns makes for a wondrous journey into the historical past before the days of the Industrial Revolution when rural England was an economic paradise—Stow-on-the-Wold, Chipping Campden, Bourton-on-the-Water, Burford, Moreton-in-Marsh, Upper Slaughter, Lower Swell. Each settlement has the mandatory river rippling gently past golden stone cottages, a buzzing village center, quaint shops and little ‘tea rooms’ advertising “Traditional Cream Teas” (think sultana scones with Devonshire clotted cream and strawberry preserves).
Castle Combe
The Prettiest Village in All England
Though it might not, geographically-speaking, fit exactly within the boundaries of the Cotswolds, there is a little secret village whose unfailing charm I’d like to share. This is Castle Combe in the county of Wiltshire, not too far away from the Cotswolds proper, not yet innundated by the downside of tourism’s throngs. Early one morning in 1962, the residents of this pretty-as-a-picture village woke up to find out that their village had been named The Prettiest Village in England! By noon, their sleepy hamlet was overtaken by tourists and they experienced their first ever traffic jam! Determined not to miss out on this delight, Llew drove us in the direction of Wiltshire and I can’t even begin to express how grateful I was for the research I had done before setting out on our discovery of the region.
Anecdotes aside, the village was the nicest thing we saw on our entire trip. Again, it boasted all the requisites of the model English village—stone cottages, abundant hanging baskets spilling over with colorful annuals—petunias, geraniums, impatiens, begonias were everywhere—a bridge across a babbling brook, the ubiquitous parish and churchyard with towering spire reaching heavenwards, a cluster of small shops and sprucely-pruned gardens. Castle Combe also had cute cottages and resplendent manors, a village well complete with pulley wheel and pail. As if to authenticate the English country scene, we were constantly sprayed with the gentle drizzle of summer rain, and had to explore the village our brollys firmly held aloft. But this did nothing to dampen our enthusiasm for an adorable little corner that, despite its distinction as England’s prettiest village, has yet managed to keep tourist hordes at bay. Indeed, it was the highlight of our entire English sojourn!
We loved the Cotswolds and we hope that you will consider spending some time rambling aimlessly amidst these rustic routes.
Bon Voyage!