A visit to Cotswold

Cotswold is a bunch of towns, cities and villages in the central western part of England. It runs across a few counties like Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire & Warwickshire. It’s apparently a range of hills the highest point of it being the Cleeve Hill.

This stretch is made up of a number of villages and towns with beautiful architecture. Most of the structures here are built with a yellow limestone that is found in this area.

Cotswold has some of the prettiest sights of England and is also regarded as a place of ‘outstanding natural beauty’. The Cotswold can be explored in many ways and we chose the easy one of driving. Moreover we only had a weekend (August Bank holiday weekend 2010) to explore the area with some friends who had to leave on Monday.

We headed off on Saturday morning after breakfast towards Oxford which is famous for its universities. Swiftly moved from there and headed towards Burford for the first glimpse of Cotswold villages.

The next village we went to was called ‘Burton on Water’. This is a typical English village is set around River Windrush. Clear water, the small bridges, lush green trees was such a pleasure to see. It’s also called ‘Venice of Cotswold’. Since it was the bank holiday weekend, there were just too many people in the village, so we decided to go back later in the year, in the autumn when there would be fewer tourists.

We headed up towards the north of the Cotswold covering a few more villages on the way. Some of the villages we visited were; The slaughters, Stow on the wold, Moreton-on-marsh, Chipping Camden, Broadway and finally Snowshill. On the way to these villages we saw some amazing cottages. Some cottages had different roofs, looked like thatched roofs, but very stylish ones.

As it was the bank holiday weekend, most places that we wanted to stay were fully booked so; we ended up staying in a town called Cirencester.
English villages have traditional tea rooms that serve Creme teas. This means, they serve scones, jam, fresh clotted creme and black tea. They were delicious.

The second day, we headed off towards a village called Lacock and then headed of towards a Castle Coombe. Castle Coombe was beautiful, it had some nice streets with good looking cottages. I wish I could just sit there and stare at those streets forever. We accidentally managed to bump into an English gentleman who works for a big consultancy and has been to India a number of times. He manages a few teams in Hyderabad and Mumbai from the UK. He was quite friendly and also managed to utter a few Hindi words.

After Castle Coombe, we headed towards the north of the Cotswold again covering Malmesbury, Tetbury, Nailsworth, Stroud, Painswick, Winchcombe, and back to Broadway & Snowshill. After which we headed home. Although, it was just a weekend.. we had a great time and it still reminds us of some really good conversations.