Nearby, Snowshill, Stanway, and Stanton are my nominations for the cutest Cotswold villages.
#Cotswold thatched roofs free
I pass the 17th-century Market Hall, the wavy slate roofline of the first great wool mansion, a fine and free memorial garden, and, finally, the town’s famous 15th-century Perpendicular Gothic “wool” church. On one end are the top-end homes with, it seems, competing thatched roofs. As in most market towns, the street is wide enough to have hosted plenty of sheep business on market days. Trevelyan calls Chipping Campden’s High Street the finest in England. Just a few miles from the train station at Moreton-in-Marsh, it was once the home of the richest Cotswold wool merchants. Chatty residents commonly rescue themselves from a gossipy tangent by saying, “It’s all very…ummm…yaaah.” In these small towns, everyone seems to know everyone. Throngs of 21st-century romantics enjoy a harmonious blend of humanity and nature…and the Cotswolds are enjoying new prosperity. Today, this most pristine English countryside is decorated with time-passed villages, gracefully dilapidated homes of an impoverished nobility, tell-me-a-story stone fences, and “kissing gates” no one should experience alone. The wool industry collapsed, mothballing the Cotswold towns into a depressed time warp. Then came the rise of cotton and the Industrial Revolution. Stained-glass slogans say things like “I thank my God and ever shall, it is the sheep hath paid for all.” Local “wool” churches are called “cathedrals” for their scale and wealth. Wool money built lovely towns and palatial houses. Wool was a huge industry in medieval England and the Cotswold sheep grew it best. Most of the land is privately owned, but you’re legally entitled to pass through, using the various sheep-stopping steps, gates, and turnstiles provided at each stone wall.Īs with many fairy-tale regions of Europe, the present-day beauty of the Cotswolds was the result of an economic disaster. By assuring each path is used at least once a year, they stop landlords from putting up fences. Once a year, the Ramblers, Britain’s largest walking club, organizes a “Mass Trespass,” when each of England’s 50,000 miles of public footpaths is walked.
Hikers vigorously defend their age-old right to free passage. The English love to walk the peaceful footpaths shepherds walked back when “polyester” only meant two girls. Everything about them - the meadows, thatched roofs, churches, pubs, B&Bs, and even the tourist offices - is quaint. The Cotswolds are crisscrossed with hedgerows, strewn with storybook villages, and sprinkled with sheep. Here’s another one of my favorite travel memories - a reminder of what’s waiting for you in Europe at the other end of this crisis. With so many of us stuck at home for the foreseeable future, I believe a daily dose of travel dreaming can actually be good medicine. As a travel writer, I try not to use the word “quaint.” But in the Cotswolds, I just can’t help myself. England’s Cotswolds is one of those places. There are places in Europe where I go to do what I call “convalesce” - places that, when I’m burned out or feeling spent, I can go to be calm and recharge.
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