Salperton

Another very warm, sunny day in the Cotswolds!  This is a little ramble around the little know and little visited village of Salperton in the Central Cotswolds.  Its an estate village, meaning the entire village is owned by the manor house.  Everyone that lives here is a long term tenant, but  they have their homes, and village, kept in immaculate condition by the local landowner.  Not a bad deal!

Shipton Oliffe & Withington Circular

I like cows.  And horses.  The problem is that my dog doesn't.  In fact, she wants to eat any animal she sees, and makes it very clear.  Even if the animal is ten times her size, and is in a herd with 25 other large animals.  The result is that my walks around the Cotswolds are getting longer and longer.

That's because I am continuously following some footpath only to discover that it crosses a field full of cows or horses.  Although serious trouble with them is rare, aggressive dogs often provoke their defenses, and can have a very bad result.  So, when this happens, I am forced to turn around and find an alternate route.  This can easily add an extra kilometer sometimes.

This walk, which should have been about 9km, was 12km.  I suppose its for the best.

We started in the little known village of Shipton Oliffe, famous for having nothing in it at all apart from a few houses and two very beautiful Norman churches, and takes in the quintessential Cotswold village of Withington.  Quite a lot of the route follows the River Coln.  Trout, anyone?

In case anyone would like to try this walk, here is the link to my ViewRanger upload:  http://my.viewranger.com/track/details/MzIxNTAyNg==

A Perfect Autumn Walk in The Cotswolds

In the southwest of The Cotswolds, between Tetbury and Chipping Sodbury, lies the Westonbirt Arboretum, where the Autumnal arboreal fireworks are some of the best in Europe.

The arboretum was created around 1829 and many of the specimens now present date back to that time. The site covers an area of 600 acres and includes areas of Ancient Semi Natural Woodland, specimen plants and open grassland. This woodland is an important area in itself as it represents one of the largest areas of woodland of its type in the area. It is primarily Oak Standards with an understorey of Hazel coppice with some areas of high forest. 

 

Today Westonbirt is a Grade One listed landscape. The Holford family, who started the collection, planted in a picturesque style following the guidelines laid down by W.S.Gilpin. It is the landscape that the Holfords created that give Wesonbirt the grade one listing. New maple plantings will, in time, create the world’s best collection of Maples and is in keeping with this tradition.

The combination of this variety of trees within a beautiful Cotswold setting make for some unforgettable walks, and are a must see if you visit during the Fall. If you'd like to see what Westonbirt looks like right now, check out their Autumn Colour Watch page, where new photos are posted on a regular basis. The official page is on the Forestry Commission's site, right here.

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Waking a Sleeping Beauty

A Brit from the industrial north of England explores the storybook world of the Cotswolds, in a classic British sports car.

On this sunny afternoon, the bells are ringing as we motor into Blockley, a secluded village in the heart of rural England. We park outside the medieval church and ask what's going on. Is it a wedding? No, says a woman with a wicker shopping basket over her arm. It's the start of the local flower show.

We cross the churchyard and join the queue outside the community hall. We hand over the £1 entrance fee and enter, only to be engulfed by a scene of joyous, unmitigated Englishness.

During our four days in the Cotswolds, that most lyrically charming region of south-central England, nothing else quite so perfectly encapsulates the appeal of village life. At one end of the hall, a framed photograph of the Queen smiles down on a group of showgoers, who in turn smile down on a vase of artfully arranged daffodils judged best flowers in the show. The woman who grew them, Brenda Samuels, can hardly believe she has won. "I'm ecstatic!" she beams.

The flower show comes at the halfway point of a driving tour that my wife, Clare, and I are taking around this region of gently rolling fields and wooded hills west of Oxford and south of Stratford upon Avon. We're following the Romantic Road to the Cotswolds' most appealing towns and villages. These picturesque communities evoke an England of timeless calm and comfortable wealth, originally built on the wool trade. It's an almost mythical place which I, growing up 40 years ago in the industrial north of the country, could only read about in books, living as I did in a city of smog and steelworks. I still have some of those childhood books, and their photographs of the Cotswolds show Arcadian scenes that have hardly changed to this day. As the English travel writer S. P. B. Mais wrote in his 1932 classic, The High Lands of Britain: "[Nowhere] else in the world can you find beauty that is more completely soothing to the soul." This blissful land was less than a hundred miles away, but it could have been another planet.

Read this outstanding article on discovering The Cotswolds by Steve McClarence on National Geographic Traveler here

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