Welcome to the Cotswolds! This is the quintessential England of rambling manor houses, sunny villages, and stone cottages with charmingly overgrown gardens. This is storybook England.
We stayed in Stow-on-the-Wold and poked around there and the nearby village of Chipping Campden, which is as quintessential Cotswolds as they get. And we were graced with cloudless skies, all the better to set off the golden Cotswold stone buildings.
Chipping Campden (town sign pictured above) was a prosperous town during the wool years. In fact, wool money made the Cotswolds. It built the houses, the gates, and the churches – which now shelter the remains of wool barons. Even today, the fields surrounding the Cotswold villages are overrun with sheep.
J.R.R. Tolkein famously hiked through the Cotswolds and sketched the sights, including this door (below), which inspired a drawing in his Lord of the Rings series. (Which I haven’t read – sorry, Katie – but will get to eventually. Really.)
I could easily picture myself settling into Cotswold village life, chatting with neighbors over a cup of tea and wandering over the footpaths on sunny afternoons. We stayed a few days, and that wasn’t near enough time to absorb the quirky charm of the region. This is going to have to be a repeat destination!
Next Friday we leave the village for a day and tour a palace! Check back!
covered in flour 
That Cotswold stone reminds me of Oxford. Be still my heart.
And LOTR is on so many people’s to-read list…you’re forgiven. 🙂
I’m so glad that we were there on sunny days, because seeing that stone against a blue sky, drenched in golden light, was breathtaking.
And I’m also glad we can still be friends even though I have been derelict in my LOTR-reading. 🙂
Love your photos! I’ve always wanted to live in the Cotswolds. Actually, there are so many places in England I’d like to live, I need several homes–Cotswolds, Lake District (where my mother’s family is from), Yorkshire, just outside London, the south–that’s five right there!
I like the way you think! I loved the Lake District when I was there in 2008; I could definitely live there. And in the Cotswolds, and in Yorkshire, and in (or outside of) London… oh, and in Provence too! And northern California! There are so many beautiful places in the world – your comment reminds me of a print I once saw with a map of the world and the phrase “I’ve left my heart in so many places.” I leave a piece of my heart practically everywhere I go!
Wow! Amazing photos!
Cotswolds looks beautiful! It is storybook-England, as you say, all right. 🙂
I LOVE that little door. It is oh-so-cute. What is behind it?!
The door leads into a lovely little village church! I don’t know if it opens anymore though; it’s not the main door to the church in any event. We went in but through a different door around the side of the building.
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