Thursday was the final day of solo sightseeing on this trip, the last day of Liz's work conference after which we would be able to travel together for the remainder of the time we had in Britain. Liz was expecting an earlier finish to her event on this day, wrapping up in the mid-afternoon after extending until dinner the night before. As a result, I planned to stay closer to Bristol rather than gallivanting off to Cornwall as I had done the day before. There was a perfect area to experience which was only about an hour's drive away, the bucolic region known as the Cotswolds. I had visited the Cotswolds briefly on a previous trip to the UK with my family, during the spring of 2005, and I remembered very well the beautiful countryside and the tiny villages that made up this area. I picked out half a dozen stops that I thought I could visit over the course of a morning and early afternoon, then headed east out of Bristol on the M4 once again to experience as much as I could over the next few hours.
The exact area comprising the Cotswolds is somewhat undefined as there are no clear political or geographic boundaries that mark off the Cotswolds from the surrounding parts of the English countryside. I grabbed a map off the Internet and included it above showing the region commonly considered to fall under this definition, an area of roughly 800 square miles / 2000 square kilometers stretching from Gloucester in the west to Woodstock in the east and from Chipping Campden in the north to Chippenham in the south. The word "Cotswold" itself comes from the Middle English term "Codesuualt" meaning "Cod's high open land" and apparently referring to the rolling hills that characterize this region. The Cotswolds is a rural area made up of small towns built from the yellow Jurassic-era limestone that characterizes the area. These little towns are so charming that they've become a major tourist attraction that bring in millions of visitors each year. This is basically the real-world equivalent of the Shrine that Tolkien was writing about in his Lord of the Rings series, even if the filming for the movies took place in New Zealand.
One other small note: I accidentally left our main camera behind in our hotel room on this day so all of these pictures were taken with my cell phone. Modern phones do an excellent job of taking most photos and I don't think it made much of a difference, though there were a couple of times that I wish I had been able to get out the telephoto lens and take a picture of something far off in the distance.
My first stop was in the town of Malmesbury, located a short drive north of the M4 and sitting at the southern end of the Cotswolds region. Malmesbury was another place that had been far more important in earlier periods of history than it happens to be today; this was once a major center of learning and one of the wealthiest and most significant towns in England. That was entirely due to the presence of Malmesbury Abbey, the surviving core of which is pictued above. An abbey was initially founded here in 675 by an Irishman named Maildubh; the name Malmesbury is a combination of "Maildubh" and "burh", meaning Maildubh's fortification. Over time, the town grew up around the abbey until the current third abbey was constructed during the 12th and 13th centuries. Originally the abbey had a spire that stretched 400 feet / 123 meters in height and was taller than Salisbury Cathedral. It didn't last, however, with medieval construction measures being far less sound than modern ones, collapsing in 1479. Much of the abbey was also destroyed during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries but fortunately at least some of the building survived to live on as the parish church of the town.
This was what the interior of Malmesbury Abbey looked like upon my visit; unsurprisingly, there was hardly anyone else present on this random weekday in early summer. The abbey felt oddly out of place in this small town, with the surviving portion of the building clearly much too grand to match its current location. It was also obvious that a large part of the building was simply missing, as the medieval collapse of the spire took out some two-thirds of the nave and the entire transept. I took a picture of the little model abbey showing what it looked like in its heydey, and yeah, I'm not surprised that that extremely tall and unsupported spire wound up falling over after a couple of centuries. What remained was still grand though and I appreciated the mirror that the abbey staff had included to point up at the ceiling and better capture the vaulted roof. This would have been a sight on par with Salisbury and Winchester cathedrals at one point in time.
Malmesbury Abbey also contained a memoral to Aethelstan, an obscure historical figure today but the man generally considered by historians to have been the first king of a united England. Aethelstan ruled for approximately two decades in the early 10th century and had a great deal of success at beating back the Danish arrivals who had taken over much of Britain during the previous century. When he died in 939, Aethelstan chose to be buried in Malmesbury Abbey which was another sign of its importance at the time. His remains were lost at some point over the centuries and therefore this empty tomb from the 15th century commemorates his early reign. Elsewhere in the abbey, there was a collection of medieval books on display including several that had been produced at the scriptorium here in Malmesbury. The town was a major center of learning in the medieval period and the famous 12th century scholar William of Malmesbury lived here at the abbey. Had events played out differently, Malmesbury could have ended up as a famous university town like Oxford or Cambridge.
There wasn't too much more to see in Malmesbury outside of the abbey but I did take a few minutes to walk around the central square of this market town. If there was one thing that stood out, it was references to King Aethelstan as this town of roughly 5000 people still hadn't forgotten about the deceased ruler. There was the store named Aethelstan's Gentleman's Outfitters, the town banners celebrating "Aethelstan 1100" for the anniversary commemorating his crowning as king in 924, and then the town hall captured in the second picture above held the Aethelstan Museum, of all things. The whole place had a definite small town charm, especially the Three Cups Inn where I had parked my rental car and which literally looked like something that could have been included in a Dungeons and Dragon session. Malmesbury was a great place to stop for an hour, see the abbey, and maybe get a bit to eat before moving on to other destinations.
I drove to the north for a little over 20 minutes on the narrow local roads before arriving at my next stop in the town of Cirencester. Pronounced locally like "Siren"-sester, this town of about 20,000 residents is the largest in the Cotswolds and claims to be the unofficial capital of the region. Cirencester was another sleepy location today that had a long and distinguished past history, mostly as an important market town taking part in the wool trade throughout the medieval period, but also as a key Roman settlement dating back a millenium earlier. I parked my rental car just south of the central part of the town and then walked towards the market square along Cirencenter's narrow and picturesque lanes. Everything was open to cars but it would be a tight squeeze getting through some of these places. There was a bit of a festivate atmosphere as Euro 2024 was about to kick off the next day and I saw a number of fliers advertising the event outside pubs and restaurants.
Cirencester was certainly a charming enough little town from what I could see as I walked through its streets, but there was a specific reason why I had bothered to stop here. That was the pictured Corinium Museum, essentially a local history museum that took its name from the Roman title of the town back when Cirencester had been known as Corinium some two thousand years earlier. Corinium was possibly the second-largest Roman settlement in Britain (after Londinium), large enough to be completely enclosed by a town wall despite not being located in a threatened border area, and the core of the modern town still occupies the same location as the Roman fort. This has resulted in all sorts of archaelogical discoveries popping up over the years as construction has taken place in Cirencester and there are likely untold numbers of artifacts that will never be unearthed since they sit underneath the current town. The entry portion of the museum walked visitors through some of the findings from the pre-Roman period of Cirencester's history, with all sorts of stone tools and burials from the Celtic and pre-Celtic inhabitants. I also appreciated the display using a light projection to show how Roman tombstones would have been brightly colored at the time, something that I've often read about but rarely had a chance to see illustrated.
Still, it was the Roman artifacts that gave the Corinium Museum its name and which were clearly the featured part of the collection. The most impressive items on display were a series of mosaics that had originally been built in fancy villas outside the town proper, later excavated in modern times and reassembled here at the museum. Although not all of these mosaics had managed to survive intact, the portions that did remain were in stunningly good condition, with the reconstructed room in the third picture above looking as though its ancient owners were about to stroll in through the doorway at any moment. There were also lots of Roman coins and fragments of building contruction on display in these rooms, and I enjoyed comparing the map of Roman Corinium to modern Cirencester; the ancient amphitheatre had been very close to where I parked my rental car.
These are a few more pictures highlighting some of the Roman artifacts on display at the museum. Historians believe that Corinium was most likely the capital of Britannia Prima, one of the later administrative divisions of the island that covered Wales and much of modern southwest England. The second floor of the museum went into more detail about Roman religion and the various burial stones found in this area. This was clearly a prosperous town for almost three centuries that extended Roman political and cultural influence into a far-flung part of the empire. And then everything collapsed at the beginning of the 5th century: the museum explained how the implosion of the western Roman state left Corinium to fend for itself, which led to a rapid deterioration of the urban center. Most of its people left for the countryside and the bulk of the town was abandoned and collapsed into ruins, surviving with a fraction of its previous population over the next few centuries. It was a sad story though of course it was not the end for what eventually became the town of Cirencester.
The remainder of the museum covered Cirencester's history from the post-Roman period to the present, starting with the Anglo-Saxon period and moving through the medieval and early modern eras. (I appreciated that it switched up the color scheme from Roman red to a dark blue to indicate this shift.) The most notable thing in Cirencester during the medieval period was a massive Augustinian abbey named the Abbey of St. Mary. It was large enough to rival the similar abbey a short distance away in Malmesbury and functioned as a center of learning for more than three centuries after its construction was completed around 1176. Almost nothing of that abbey exists today, another casualty of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, though there is a public park with a few of its ruins located on the northern side of the town. Then there was fighting in Cirencester during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms with a minor battle in 1643 in which some 300 people were killed. Since then, this has largely remained a small local market town that, like Malmesbury, could have grown into something bigger if history had played out differently.
I spent a little less than an hour in the museum before finishing up at the gift store and heading out. I wanted to see the town's market square which was only about a block away and easily reached in a few minutes by foot. There wasn't a lot going on in the square on this Thursday morning in June though it looked like a nice place to eat at one of the restaurants ringing the open space. Cirencester's market square sat directly underneath the town's parish church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and this was an unusually large church to be situated in such a small town. Parts of the church date back to the 12th century which was reflected in its Gothic architectural style, though the nave has been rebuilt twice since the initial construction and all of the original stained glass has long since been replaced. At one point in time the church connected to the medieval abbey, however now there's only an open field to the north with signs indicating where the abbey once stood.
These were some pictures taken from the interior of Saint John the Baptist which was predictably almost empty when I visited. The building was clearly very, very large for a parish church and came close to qualifying as a cathedral, a good indication of the wealth that the wool trade brought to Cirencester throughout the medieval era. The frequent use of stained glass in this Gothic design gave the building a light and colorful feeling despite all of the heavy stonework. I also noticed that at least some of the local populace were still upset about the destruction of the abbey five centuries earlier, as it was commemorated with a small banner and even depicted in a reconstruction of the church made out of Legos. The real abbey may have disappeared but I guess it can still live on in Lego form.
I wrapped things up in Cirencester and walked back to my nearby rental car, then drove north once again for about half an hour heading deeper into the Cotswolds. This time I was traveling to a village so small that it didn't even appear on that map of the Cotswolds that I posted at the top of this page, soon arriving at the hamlet known as Lower Slaughter. This is one of a pair of settlements, with Upper Slaughter located about a mile away upriver within easy walking distance. The names of these tiny villages don't have anything to do with slaughter or killing, instead being derived from the Old English word "slough" which refers to an area of wet land. Lower Slaughter had a population of only 236 people at the time of writing but the village has been here for at least a thousand years as its presence was attested in the Domesday Book of 1086. The two Slaughters are a tourist attraction today thanks to their picturesque nature, often looking more like a movie set than a place where people actually live. I parked at the edge of town and took these pictures of the Slaughters Country Inn, the local parish church of Saint Mary, and the Slaughters Manor House where much of the building dates back to the 17th century.
All of those buildings mentioned above were situated at the western end of Lower Slaughter. The village was so tiny that I could walk in one or two minutes over to the central part of the hamlet where a row of houses ran alongside the little River Eye. This was the literal definition of a one-street town as almost the entirety of Lower Slaughter can be seen in this handful of pictures. The houses all had that same distinct Cotswolds appearance, built out of the local limestone with that weathered look indicating that they had stood there for several centuries. Many of these houses have been converted into tourist destinations where visitors can stay for a tidy sum. There's very little to do in Lower Slaughter, of course, but the place couldn't have been much prettier to look at. I walked along the single road, following it upstream to the one other location of note in the town:
That would be this old mill which looked to be as quaint as the rest of the town. It holds a small museum and a cafe although the museum was closed for some reason on the day that I visited, thus preventing me from popping inside and taking a closer look. Visitors can continue walking further west for about a mile from here until reaching Upper Slaughter which is about the same size and has a similar appearance. However, in the interests of saving time, I opted to turn around and walk back through Lower Slaughter until reaching the country inn near where I parked my rental car. There's a walking trail known as the Warden's Way that connects all of the little villages in the area together, and my plan was to take it to the next town to the south. That would be the larger town of Bourton-on-the-Water which had more in the way of tourist attractions.
It turned out to be a walk of roughly 2 miles / 3 kilometers along the Warden's Way to get from Lower Slaughter to Bourton-on-the-Water. The initial part of the trail was quite scenic, passing along old crumbling stone walls and then past some horse pastures. I had the thought that going horseback riding from village to village would be the ideal way to see these little places, much as someone might have done back in the medieval or early modern periods. Unfortunately the Warden's Way became a lot less interesting after it crossed over the A429 road, becoming a sidewalk in a suburban setting as it passed through a series of housing developments. (These pictures are all from the much prettier upper half of the path.) Even though I'm a fast walker, I was kind of regretting my decision to walk here instead of simply driving during the latter part of the trip. The Warden's Way did run past the local St. Lawrence's Church which would have been worth stopping to explore if it hadn't been concluding a funeral service right as I arrived. It would have been grossly insensitive to push inside and start snapping pictures when all these people were dressed in mourning black so I simply took a quick look from the outside and kept going.
After a little more than a half hour of walking, I arrived at the northern edge of Bourton-on-the-Water. This was clearly a much larger and busier town, one of the major tourist hubs of the area that dubbed itself the "Venice of the Cotswolds" thanks to the River Windrush running through its center. Bourton-on-the-Water holds more than ten times the population of Lower Slaughter with about 3300 residents at the time of writing, though the village's inhabitants tend to get swamped during the summer months as more than 300,000 people arrive annually. The roads here are wide enough to handle the big tour buses and they drop off visitors by the hundreds to see the beautiful little river that flows through the heart of the town. Tourists have been coming here since the 1930s and the town's economy is almost wholly devoted to accomodating them. I saw lots of signs here advertising restaurants, cafes, souvenir shops, ice cream vendors, and so on.
For all of the various touristy kitsch, there was no denying the attractiveness of Bourton-on-the-Water. The town has carefully cultivated the image of an idyllic village from an earlier era and it was hard to ignore the charm of that little river that ran past everything. There are five low stone bridges that cross the river, several of which date back to the 17th and 18th centuries and only two of which are open to motor vehicles. A number of the historic buildings that sit next to the water have been turned into restaurants and I found myself wishing that Liz and I could have gotten dinner here together. It was hard to think of a more scenic place to enjoy a good meal.
These are a few more pictures of the main tourist area in Bourton-on-the-Water following along the river, complete with ducks paddling in the water to make the scene even more tranquil. This was not the first time that I had visited Bourton-on-the-Water, believe it or not, as I had briefly stopped here back in 2005 along with my family. We were visiting London to see my brother, who was doing a semester study abroad program at the time, and we rented a car for a weekend and drove out to the Cotswolds. I remember that we were navigating using a paper map and we didn't stay for long here, only stopping to get a quick bite to eat while enjoying the scenery. I don't have any pictures from that trip and I was glad that I could capture some of my own images of this little town during this second return visit.
There are a number of tourist attractions in Bourton-on-the-Water including a model railway, a maze, and a motoring museum that I had walked past earlier. However, the only tourist draw that I stopped to visit was the pictured model village, a 1:9 scale replica of the historic portion of the entire town. The model village dates back to 1937 and has an amazing level of detail with seemingly everything in the town present (or at least everything that had been here in the 1930s). There was the church that I had walked past earlier, there were the old buildings running along the river (which was only a dry patch on the model and would have looked better with running water), and there was even a tiny version of the model village itself inside the model village. This started to get really confusing as that model village also had its own model village and THAT model village had a few tiny dots indicating it had its own model village as well! The whole thing was worth visiting and only cost a few pounds, with the place being perfect for kids to run around for a few minutes. I do think that the model village could have used a little more polish though as it felt a bit rundown in some places.
Much as I enjoyed visiting Bourton-on-the-Water, I now found myself having to walk back to Lower Slaughter again since that was where I had parked my rental car. This proved to be unremarkable and I did my best to jog most of the way there to save some time. It was already after noon at this point and I needed to be back in Bristol in time to get dinner with Liz after her work conference wrapped up. There was one more nearby destination that I wanted to see before leaving, another small town only a few miles to the north of the Slaughters. I ended up taking a local road to get there as Google Maps routed me around traffic, and these pictures above demonstrated what that looked like. Keep in mind that this was a two-way road with traffic regularly coming in the opposite direction - have I mentioned enough times that England has narrow roads?
This last destination for the day was the historic market town of Stow-on-the-Wold. Like the "wold" portion of the Cotswolds, the town's name refers to the tall hill on which it sits. Stow-on-the-Wold has been used as a local gathering place since at least the 12th century and likely earlier than that, with its market square hosting fairs for long centuries on end. This town is comparable in size to the nearby Bournton-on-the-Water with about 2500 residents, and because of their close proximity, all of the tourist buses that visit one of the towns inevitably stop at the other one too. I was able to find a parking spot just off the market square and then walked through the center of the small town. I passed by the back entrance to the Stow Lodge Hotel, one of the nicer and more expensive places to stay in town, before snapping a picture of the town hall and some of the various shops and pubs.
These were some more pictures taken in and around the central market square of the town. The buildings in Stow-on-the-Wold had the same characteristic Cotswolds style that I had been seeing throughout the day, including one house named Harper's Cottage which according to a sign dated back to 1594. It was a private house where a current family was still living, obviously with some modernization but still pretty impressive. The one thing that Stow-on-the-Wold was lacking in comparison to the last few towns that I had visited was a river flowing through it; by the nature of its hilltop location, that wasn't something that I was going to find here. I also tried to capture the backed up traffic in a couple of these images, as Stow-on-the-Wold had really bad traffic anywhere that the roads weren't closed off to cars. This village had been mostly built during the medieval period and was never intended to handle modern vehicles, much less the tourist rush that arrived every summer. I can only imagine how bad things would be on a weekend as opposed to a Thursday afternoon.
My walking route in Stow-on-the-Wold had taken me on a big circle around the middle of the town. The last place that I had saved until the end of my stop was a visit to the town's historic church, the pictured St. Edward's Church. There are records indicating that a church of some kind has sat here since 986 though none of that original building remains; the oldest parts of the current church date from the 12th century with most of it having been built later in the medieval period. The most interesting part of St. Edwards was the pair of ancient yew trees flanking the northern door to the church. The rumor is that JRR Tolkien visited this church on one of his many trips through the Cotswolds and drew inspiration from this entrance, using them as the basis for the "Doors of Durin" which the Fellowship passes through before reaching the mines of Moria. Whether or not that's true, this doorway was among the prettiest I've ever seen and definitely could have come straight out of a fantasy novel.
Finally, these were some pictures taken from the interior of St. Edward's Church. The relatively small church radiated the feeling of great age as most of it had been constructed during the 13th and 14th centuries. There was the expected memorial here dedicated to the shockingly large number of town residents who died during the Great War along with a series of bright stained glass windows that brought light into the building's interior. St. Edward's Church had another claim to fame as there was a battle that took place just north of Stow during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in 1646. Parliamentry forces defeated the royalists and forced them to surrender in the same market square that I had just passed through, with this church afterwards holding several hundred royalist prisoners. One of the combatants killed in the battle, Captain Hastings Keyt, was buried in front of the altar and I could still see his much-worn tombstone underfoot. Between the nearby battle and the Tolkien trees outside, there was a lot of history here at this local church.
Stow-on-the-Wold was the last place that I visited on this trip through the Cotswolds before heading back to Bristol. If I'd had more time available, I would have driven to the eastern edge of the area to see Blenheim Palace where the Duke of Marlborough made his home, and then tried to stop in Gloucester at the western side of the Cotswolds which has its own famous cathedral. No one can see everything though and I was quite happy with the places that I managed to reach over the course of about five hours. The Cotswolds is an extremely beautiful area and worth stopping to visit even though it can be pretty touristy at times. Just try to make it a priority to see some of the less famous places like Malmesbury or Cirencester instead of the tourist bus meccas to get a better feel for the area. For a region where people have been raising sheep for several thousand years, it's still a fun place to experience.
