Today we walked village to village (to village to village), followed by Sunday lunch in an elegant manor hotel. The villages are lovely and timeless, in part because this region was severely depressed and isolated after the price of wool dropped in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. Ironically that “saved” the villages from being redeveloped, leaving them architecturally intact when tourism discovered the region in the early 20th century, and grew with the designation of the 2000 square mile “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” designation in 1966.
We started our walk outside the gates of a manor where JM Barrie of Peter Pan fame often visited. (I should have mentioned that last night’s pub was gifted a Shakespearean sonnet by the Bard himself.) The sense of hidden history was everywhere— most buildings date from before the 16th century, all of the villages and most of the manors were present in the Domesday Book, the fields still show the ridge and farrow pattern from medieval strip farming, and it’s all both taken for granted and treasured. Recent excavations have found evidence of Mesolithic ( older than Neolithic) occupation in this part of the Cotswolds.
Some of our group got to watch (change, not hand) bell ringers practice before services. Most villages had road closures today for the last day of the Jubilee celebrations, which provided some real challenges for our bus driver. After lunch we visited the Broadway Tower, a fanciful construction from the late 18th century, but one that subsequently figured in the pre-Raphaelite movement and the Battle for Britain.
Pictured: the Tower Bridge ( note the double decker buses on the lift bridge) across the canal in Lower Slaughter for the Jubilee Fete, a row of houses with their front gardens in Stanton, and the Broadway Tower.
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