A Walk on the Cotswold

A quaint English village, built entirely of weathered, honey-colored limestone. A network of footpaths leading to lots of other quaint English villages. A friendly, half-timbered pub at the end of the day. If this sounds like your idea of Anglophile heaven, then you need to start planning a trip to England’s Cotswolds district. My wife Carol and I recently returned from the Cotswolds and we are still lost in a reverie of mill brooks, stone churches and 400-year-old farmers’ markets.

The Cotswold district consists of a hilly region of ridges and valleys about two hours northwest of London, just west of the ancient university city of Oxford. It’s a largely rural district, consisting mostly of pastures, fields and woodlots.

Dozens of tiny villages and small towns dot the map, most of which date from the heyday of England’s wool industry in the 1300s and 1400s. The ancient woolen mills have long been converted to houses and inns, but the pastures are still alive with the baa-ing of the region’s famous sheep.

Nearly every house is made of golden Cotswolds limestone. Nearly every churchyard is studded with flowers and ancient gravestones.

The best way to describe the Cotswolds would be to say: It’s the closest you’ll ever get to being in J.R.R. Tolkien’s idyllic Shire.

This is no coincidence. Tolkien lived in nearby Oxford and spent much of his life tramping the woods and pastures of the Cotswolds for creative inspiration.

The first big decision in planning our visit was: By train or by rental car? The Cotswolds are about 100 miles away from London. We could get there by rail, but this would severely limit our options.

The only classic Cotswolds town with a rail station is Moreton-in-Marsh. It’s a fine little market town, but we finally decided, with advice from our invaluable Rick Steves’ “Great Britain” guidebook, that we needed more mobility and flexibility. We finally decided to rent a car at Heathrow and drive to the Cotswolds.

This opened up our lodging possibilities tremendously. We searched the Web for Cotswolds B&Bs, of which there are dozens. We finally settled on a place called Arreton House, that seemed to fit our needs. It was relatively inexpensive (about 54 British pounds a night, or $108) and off the tourist path in a village named Blockley.

I will admit, there were times during the drive from Heathrow when I regretted that rental car decision. Not only did I have to drive on the left side of the road in an unfamiliar car, with unfamiliar traffic rules, but I also had to accustom myself to the fact that I was sitting on the wrong side (that is, the right side) of the car.

I nearly scraped a couple of ancient stone buildings while driving down narrow village lanes. I kept forgetting that several feet of car was sticking out to my left.

Yet we finally made it, nervous and shaking, to Arreton House. All of the stress melted away as owner Gloria Baylis greeted us effusively in the stone courtyard and showed us to our room.

Arreton House was exactly as we had envisioned, with a charming stone-and-timber breakfast room and a nice bedroom. We also had our own bathroom, which is hardly a given in British B&Bs.

The best thing about it, however, was the village in which it was located. Blockley is exceptionally quaint and charming even by Cotswolds standards. What makes it different from more famous Cotswolds towns is its size – only about 2,000 people – and its hidden location.

Blockley is almost entirely ignored by tourists because it is off the main routes and nestled in a tight little valley. The High Street is so narrow that tour buses would never be able to squeeze through, much less turn around when the street dead-ends.

The result: A quiet and unspoiled village, the kind where you half expect to run into Miss Marple from an Agatha Christie novel.

On our first evening there, we strolled happily through nearly the entire village. High Street was lined with warm, honey-colored cottages and houses, each one with a name – Skylark Cottage or Michaelmas Cottage, say – instead of a number.

When we took a footpath down toward the little brooks that run through town, we saw a number of old woolen mills and silk mills that have been converted into beautiful old houses.

Near the town center, we came upon Churchill Close – the village green. A few dozen locals, all dressed in white, were engaged in a lawn bowling match on the immaculate bowling green.

Towering above the bowling green was the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Blockley’s parish church and one of the most picturesque churches in the Cotswolds. The golden stone has taken on a rusty-orange tint from centuries of weathering; it dates from around 1160.

We wandered through the lush green churchyard, trying to read the eroded stones. The classic Norman tower looks so old that it appears to be part of the earth, yet inside, the church is bright and beautifully kept. A gorgeous stained glass window let in a cheerful rainbow of light.

Blockley turned out to be a perfect choice for us for another reason as well: We wanted to hike. Or ramble, as they say in these parts.

We knew we were in an accommodating spot when the village pub, the Great Western Arms, advertised, “Walkers welcome.” The pub offers free parking for roamers.

We had our choice of a half-dozen great walks, right out of Blockley. We found a walking map at the B&B, also available for sale at the village’s only store.

On our first day, we headed north on a marked footpath that took us through a bright yellow field of rapeseed. Then we scrambled over a stile (a step-like contraption that allows walkers to get over fences) and found ourselves in a series of farm meadows and pastures.

The pastures were a rich emerald green, cropped by the friendly and wooly Cotswolds sheep or by the ridiculously contented-looking cows. Pheasants and partridges by the dozens stalked through every field.

Sometimes, our route – usually a tractor-track or just a trampled trail – took us right through the middle of a herd of sheep. They were unperturbed. They simply looked at us and moved out of the way.

Often, the path would run alongside a hedgerow, alive with spring birds unfamiliar to Americans – the chaffinch, the great tit, the linnet, the yellowhammer and the robin.

No, not our American robin. This was the original European robin, a cute little thrush about half the size of ours and with a breast more orangey-red than rusty.

Sometimes the footpath would head through dark, tangled woodlots and forests, and sometimes up high ridges, where the path would become more like a mountain trail, complete with badger runs.

Eventually, we dropped into the beautiful little village of Broad Campden, with its thatched-roof cottages and its topiary hedges.

We decided to press on through farm fields to the larger town of Chipping Campden. Sometimes we felt like we were walking right through people’s backyards.

In America, we would have felt like trespassers. Here, long tradition has established walkers’ rights-of-way through private fields and yards. Nobody will object, as long as you don’t harass the sheep.

At Chipping Campden, we wandered through the green and flower-strewn churchyard of St. James Chipping Campden.

Chipping Campden is squarely on the tour-bus track, and for good reason. The broad High Street is filled with wonderful stone shops, pubs and bookstores. Dominating the middle of High Street is the ancient stone canopy of the Market Hall, built in 1627 to keep the market traders out of the rain.

We strolled through town and had lunch at the half-timbered Red Lion Inn pub. Now that’s what I call a civilized hiking lunch: a baguette sandwich and a pint of Greene King Olde Trip ale. It sure beats a bottle of water and handful of gorp.

That afternoon, we walked back to Blockley via a different route, this one including a large block of forest. As we made our way through the damp, dark woods, we felt like we were tramping our way through Tolkien’s Old Forest.

By the time we were back in Blockley, relaxing with dinner and a pint at the pub, we felt like we had spent the best of all possible days in the Cotswolds.

We didn’t walk every day. One day, we drove to Blenheim Palace, one of the most famous destinations in Britain, in the little town of Woodstock, just outside of Oxford.

It was built in the early 1700s for John Churchill, a heroic general and the first Duke of Marlborough. Yes, he was a distant ancestor of that other famous Churchill.

In fact, Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace, despite the fact that he never actually lived there. Winston’s mother went into labor while attending a party thrown by the duke and duchess.

As we walked toward the palace from the car park, we were stunned by the scale and grandeur of this circa-1720s building. And then, as we walked through an entrance gate, we realized we hadn’t even been looking at the palace. We had been ogling just one little wing.

When we saw the palace in its entirety, we experienced the most jaw-dropping moment of our entire trip to England. Blenheim Palace is so grand, so monumental, so over-the-top, it can best be compared to Versailles.

A guided tour (highly recommended) takes you through most of the magnificent state rooms. A second, Disney-style multimedia tour attempts, with slightly laughable results, to make the old palace’s history come alive. A “maid” ushers you through rooms where life-size figures suddenly come to life. Kids will like the audio-animatronics.

One wing of the palace is entirely off-limits to tourists; the elderly 11th Duke of Marlborough still lives there. (No, he is not audio-animatronic.)

The palace is set on more than 2,000 acres of grounds, some designed by the famous landscape architect Capability Brown. We wandered past serpentine lakes, quiet groves, towering monuments, hidden temples and a cascading waterfall.

There’s also a “pleasure garden” (read: kid’s play area) that includes a giant hedge maze of the Harry Potter variety. Carol and I got lost in it for a good 20 minutes.

We had planned to visit Hampton Court near London on this trip as well. We dropped that plan. After Blenheim, any other palace in Britain would have been anticlimactic.

The next day, we went to Moreton-in-Marsh for its outdoor market, held there every week for about 400 years.

I highly recommend going to this particular market, or any English farmer’s market (there are several great ones in London, including the Borough Market underneath the south side of London Bridge). Markets are great places to browse, people-watch, and steep yourself in local color.

Moreton-in-Marsh’s market is loaded with great local cheesemongers, greengrocers and butchers who keep up a line of patter to attract customers. We also browsed through tables full of secondhand books and booths of Kashmiri shawls.

Dinner every night in Blockley was at the same spot, the Great Western Arms pub – and not only because it was right across the street, and not only because there was no other alternative in Blockley (except for a pricier hotel restaurant).

We went because the Great Western Arms food was homemade, inexpensive and very good. They had classic pub fare, like haddock and chips, but they also had homemade curries and pastas.

Every Tuesday night is steak night, with steaks from what it advertised as the best butcher in Gloucestershire. I can’t confirm that claim, but I can confirm that the steak was tender and loaded with flavor, probably from those aforementioned contented cows. And the price was right: only about six pounds, or $12.

The Great Western Arms had another huge draw, at least for anyone who loves real English ale. The Great Western is a Hook Norton pub, Hook Norton being one of the best and most traditional breweries in England. I loved both of the ales on tap, the Hooky Bitter and the Old Hooky.

Travel writer Henry Shukman recently went into raptures about Old Hooky in The New York Times:

“It’s a legend in the annals of real ale, a vessel of hazel clarity, redolent of harvest stubble lit by an evening sun, of woods drenched in rain, of dewy meadows at dawn, of cattle in dells, of Thomas Hardy and sandy-gray churches nestled in the nook of sheep-studded hills. If this isn’t the drinkable essence of England, nothing is.”

All I can say is: Yeah. That nails it.

On the last day of our visit to Blockley, I walked up a footpath, through some pastures to a ridge. Then I turned and looked down upon the village.

Most of the cottages were obscured by trees, in the green dell. All I could see was a golden glow and the ancient spire of St. Peter and St. Paul standing high above the trees.

That’s a memory that will serve me well when I’m reading my next Miss Marple novel.