Thou art more lovely and more temperate

An unpreposessing start to the day with undoubtedly the worst coffee I’ve had in the UK and a late, silent, blinker agnostic driver who liked to use all lanes of the road. The day could only get better and it definitely did.

I had booked a town car to take me to the Cotswolds, prior to a private tour starting from Moreton in Marsh. It was dark till we reached Oxford and then the sun came up just as we reached the good bits. We drove through Burford and I fell in love, only to promptly cheat on that love as we passed through the next village and then the next. I have never been anywhere so heartbreakingly lovely. The beauty of the autumn foliage, the limestone cottages and the rolling hills is impossible to capture in photos, but I did my best.

I had enough time in Moreton in Marsh to grab a coffee and a raspberry croissant (yum!), before being picked up by Richard, my guide. He was excellent - blending information and local knowledge with a great personality and some pretty good driving on the small lanes, where reversing skills are clearly a requirement. We stopped in six villages, each time he gave me a brief rundown on the sights, a little laminated map with a walking path on it, and a set time to be back at the car. Depending on the village I had between 20 minutes and 2 hours to explore each one. I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves, with just a few highlight stories.

One of my favourite moments was in Upper Slaughter, where I was dropped off just down the hill from a little church. By the time I reached the house next to the church, an older gent was waiting at his gate there and said to me “So where are you from?”. He was clearly up for a chat and I found out he had lived in the village since he was 4, in this current house for 45 years after moving from one just a few doors down. He never married (“the other lads were too quick and took all the girls”) but wished he had because it’s very lonely at night. Here’s his house. 

In Snowshill we looked at a house that was given to Catherine Parr as part of her dowry, and was eventually owned by a “collector” (hoarder) with the motto “let nothing perish”  who collected more than 22000 items there. I also saw a fabulous older couple in a vintage convertible complete with leather luggage strapped to a rack on the back and leather driving hats and goggles. SO wanted to get a photo from the front but wasn’t quick enough. 

Lunch was a pie and a cider at a little thatched roof pub in Broadway that had the fire going. I suspect it was for atmosphere, as the weather here is positively balmy compared to Yorkshire. I understand that roof thatching costs about $250 a square meter and needs doing every ten years or so. It’s ironic that they were originally a poor mans roof, installed because the material was waste and labour was cheap. Now the material is still cheap but the labour makes it the most expensive roof you can get.  

At Stanway, after looking at the Earl’s residence including a 16th century gatehouse, we climbed over a style to look at the cricket ground with the clubhouse funded by JM Barry (of Peter Pan fame) who played cricket there with Arthur Conan Doyle, HG Wells and AA Milne. I’m kind of wondering about how and why two children’s authors, a Sci Fi writer and Detective fiction writer all ended up friends and intend to do some research. Here’s the house.

 A couple of final photos because I can’t bear to leave them off. An 85 year old model village tourist attraction that’s an exact 1/9th copy of the High Street and surrounds of Bourton on the Water (£4.50 entry), and a couple of gorgeous landscape/ house photos.