 recently had to employ the services of marshalls to 'promote good behaviour' after being besieged by bovine tourists. All of which makes me wonder whether the Cotswolds are really all that. They're miles from any beach. They have no great mountains or vast lakes. Are they really all they're cracked up to be? In one sense, yes. They're immodestly, shamelessly gorgeous. Rolling hills, ancient woodlands, gentle streams… home to some of Britain's most rarely spotted wildlife as well as its most commonly papped celebrities. They weren't named England's largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty for nothing. And it's not just nature. There are all those little honeypot villages, with their twisting lanes, church towers and cottages built from that limestone that literally glows, as if the homes){kind=link}
They’re miles from any beach, they have no great mountains or vast lakes – and yet they are infested with Range Rovers. What’s going on?
Laurie Lee moved to the Cotswolds in 1917 and remembered it thus: “I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.”
Swap carrier cart for Hybrid SUV, and you have the experience of many a West London child, repotted during the pandemic. Where else would they run to? For many, the rest of the British countryside has disappeared, in a puff of fresh, faintly manure-scented air. All that remains is 800 square miles of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The Cotswolds. And thus, according to the Office for National Statistics, the average house price in the area rose by 15 per cent in the year to March. That’s the equivalent of £171 a day. Enough, in fact, to snag you one of this seasons’ key rural-rah accessories from Barbour’s collab with Alexa Chung.
Nor has this collective amnesia only infected the second-home set. The day trippers among us have shunted blindly and brainlessly up the A44 too, in long lemming-like tailbacks. Bourton-on-the-Water (a place so self-reflectively cute it has a shrine to its own itsy-bitsy-ness in the form of a model village) recently had to employ the services of marshalls to “promote good behaviour” after being besieged by bovine tourists.
All of which makes me wonder whether the Cotswolds are really all that. They’re miles from any beach. They have no great mountains or vast lakes. Are they really all they’re cracked up to be?