Cotswolds

     We toured the northern Cotswolds for two days last week. We stopped at about a half-dozen towns, visiting some churches, town squares, pubs and cafes, and a market. The towns are old—some date to pre-Norman invasion, lots have 12^th to 15^th century building and hosted momentous events usually during the Civil War. They are well known for being constructed of local limestone, the same stone with which many of the Oxford colleges are built. It is a golden brown color, darker and warmer than the paler version we saw in Bath.

The Cotswold Arms, Burford

 

     In Burford and Chipping Camden we visited beautiful old churches, St John the Baptist  and St James. Both were funded and built by wealthy wool merchants who dominated the area. Along with others in the area, they are known as “wool churches.” Both of the churches we visited were full of stories. In Burford, one of the highlights is a large, prominent wall memorial to Henry VIII’s barber (there is no escaping the presence of Henry anywhere it seems). At first I found it comic that the barber had such local standing, but then remembered that the he could also act as a surgeon and drew blood (remember barber's poles?--grandchildren, ask your parents). There is also a plaque recognizing three Levellers who were executed outside the church for leading a rebellion against Oliver Cromwell (political leftists; they weren’t royalists). I read many Diggers and Levellers’ pamphlets and broadsides years ago; they were for greater democratic participation (not just the propertied class) and economic equality.  It was moving to see a place where they had been in action.  And so much for church sanctuary when you are in a religious/economic battle with Oliver Cromwell.

St John the Baptist, Burford

St James, Chipping Campden

In Chipping Campden at St. James, we were greeted by a friendly, older man who asked us where we were from, and he mentioned that he had family in the States. So we worked through some geography—he had a niece in Northern Virginia, well specifically Fairfax, in some small town called Herndon. Small world, though we don’t know the niece.

     Chipping Camden was one of our favorite places. Like the other Cotswold towns we visited, the town square was once the site of sales and auctions of sheep herds, and a number of now quaint little lanes that come into the square were formerly used to manage the sheep. As with the other towns, one of the main streets was Sheep Street.  The industry still dominates the area, with large flocks of sheep in every vista--though we didn’t come across any sheep herds on the road as we have in Ireland.

     We started our morning in Chipping Campden in a lovely little tea shop for coffee and tea. The ladies there were quite amused by my choice of apple pie for breakfast; what’s funny about that? It's all part of my explorations. Across from the shop was a medieval outdoor market. One of the reasons we were there was because of a “foodie” market that day as part of a week-long celebration of local foods in the Cotswold. There were about ten stalls with interesting people and a nice range of local meat and cheese and liquor and oil as well as imported tea and olive oil. But it wasn’t what he hoped. 

 

     A seemingly more successful local industry than locovore food was the remnants of a turn of the last century arts and crafts movement. The Court Barn Museum near St James Church has a well designed exhibit of work by bookbinders, potters, silversmiths, furniture makers, sculptors, and jewelers who worked in the area in the early 1900s. They had moved from a guild of handicrafts in London to celebrate rural life and hand made goods. The guild didn’t flourish, but decedents of some of the original artists are still fashioning beautiful pieces.

     The loveliest scenes for us were in Lower and Upper Slaughter, two very small towns—just a few dozen houses at most—about a mile apart. The gently rolling landscape, cut into various rectangles by hedgerows, the houses surrounded by neat, small gardens, and of course the sheep scattered across the meadows create an ideal pastoral scene. There is a walking path between the two, which we planned on taking, but when we saw no one on it and a number of people walking the road between towns, we decided it may be too muddy for us without wellies. So we drove. The largest building in each hamlet has been converted into a hotel. I guess that’s the alternative to keeping the estate and opening it to tourists.

     Unrelated to this post, but thought I’d mention it because it kept coming up on this Cotswold trip: I’m trying to understand the difference between “lovely” and “brilliant” as responses. Give a clerk the right amount of change and he or she might use either word in place of “thank you,” which is what we say in the States. We overheard someone ask, “where’s the loo?” and after being given directions, the answer was “brilliant,” but when someone gets an answer to whether there are more croissants, it seems to be “lovely.”  The difference doesn’t seem to be situation, age or gender, or even class, though I’m still wondering about that. In any case it is lovely how they use the world brilliant around here (maybe it’s Oxford?).