Cotswolds (Bourton-on-the-Water)

Top things to do in Cotswolds (Bourton-on-the-Water)

1. 01

   Bibury and Arlington Row - the weavers' cottages on the Coln

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   A terrace of steeply gabled stone cottages above a water meadow, built as a wool store around the late 14th century and converted for weavers a couple of hundred years later. William Morris called Bibury the most beautiful village in England and the row is now National Trust property, still lived in, so admire it from the lane. The clear chalk-fed Coln runs alongside past the trout farm, and the whole thing takes fifteen minutes to see, which is why timing beats planning: before nine or after five you may have it to yourself.

2. 02

   Bourton-on-the-Water - the Windrush, the low bridges and the Model Village

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   The anchor village, where the River Windrush runs shallow and wide straight down the green under a line of low stone footbridges, which is what earned it the Venice of the Cotswolds tag it never asked for. Behind the high street sits a one-ninth scale model of the village itself, laid in the same stone in the 1930s, complete with a model of the model. Add a bird park with penguins and a motoring museum and it is the most family-friendly stop in the region, and by some distance the busiest on a summer afternoon.

3. 03

   Broadway Tower - the folly on the escarpment edge

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   A mock Saxon watchtower thrown up in the 1790s on the second-highest point of the Cotswolds, with a view that reaches over a dozen counties on a clear day. William Morris used it as a summer retreat, and the state of the buildings around him fed directly into his campaign to protect ancient buildings. A Cold War nuclear monitoring bunker sits in the same field, and the walk up from Broadway's chestnut-lined high street is the right way to arrive.

4. 04

   The Cotswold Way - the escarpment trail from Chipping Campden to Bath

   hiking scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   A National Trail of about 102 miles that runs the western edge from the market hall at Chipping Campden all the way to Bath Abbey, mostly along the top of the scarp where the hills drop away to the Severn Vale and the Malverns and the Welsh hills line the horizon. Walkers do it in a week or so, but the trail is at its best in day-sized bites: Cleeve Hill, the highest ground in the range, the beech hangers above Painswick, and the iron age hillforts strung along the edge.

5. 05

   The Slaughters - the field path from Bourton to Upper Slaughter

   hiking scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   Two villages on the little River Eye with grimly misleading names, connected to Bourton by a flat mile and a half of waymarked field path and to each other by a riverside walk. Lower Slaughter has a red-brick mill chimney standing incongruously over the stream and a row of cottages fronted by their own footbridges; Upper Slaughter has almost nothing at all, which is the point. Walk it and both villages are quiet even when the car park in Bourton is full.

6. 06

   Chipping Campden - the curved high street and the Market Hall

   history culture arts

   The finest street in the Cotswolds, a long shallow curve of golden stone with no two buildings quite alike, anchored by an arcaded market hall built in 1627 for the traders in butter, cheese and poultry. The wool church at the top end carries the brasses of the merchants who paid for it. Campden is also the home of the Arts and Crafts movement's boldest experiment, when a London guild of silversmiths and cabinetmakers moved here wholesale in 1902, and the silversmithing tradition never left.

7. 07

   Hidcote Manor Garden - the garden built as a series of rooms

   scenic culture arts

   Lawrence Johnston's early 20th-century garden above Chipping Campden, laid out as a sequence of hedged outdoor rooms, each with its own planting and mood, opening onto long views at the end of the axis. It rewrote English garden design and the National Trust has kept it intact. Kiftsgate Court sits across the lane, a family-made garden of the same era and a completely different temperament, and doing both in one afternoon is the local move.

8. 08

   Sudeley Castle and Winchcombe - Katherine Parr's tomb and the hill paths

   history hiking

   Henry VIII's last wife lived at Sudeley and is buried in the chapel in its grounds, the only English queen resting on private land, with Tudor ruins and layered gardens around the house. Winchcombe below it calls itself the walking capital of the Cotswolds and earns it: Belas Knap, a neolithic long barrow with a false entrance, sits on the hill above, and the trail to Cleeve Hill starts in the town.

9. 09

   Chedworth Roman Villa - mosaics in a wooded combe

   history

   One of the largest Romano-British villas known, found by a gamekeeper in the 1860s in a side valley of the Coln and now roofed over by the National Trust. Two bath houses, an underfloor heating system you can look straight into, and mosaic floors with the four seasons worked into them. The setting does half the work: a wooded fold in the hills with a spring, which is presumably why a Roman landowner picked it.

10. 10

    The wool churches - Northleach, Fairford and Cirencester

    history culture arts

    Village churches built at cathedral scale by merchants buying their way towards heaven with fleece money. Northleach has the memorial brasses, wool merchants standing with their feet on sheep and woolsacks; Fairford keeps a complete set of medieval stained glass, alone among English parish churches, including a full Last Judgement over the west end; Cirencester's has a three-storey porch that once served as the town hall.

11. 11

    Stow-on-the-Wold - the market square and the yew-flanked door

    history shopping

    The highest of the Cotswold towns, exposed enough that the saying runs where the wind blows cold, built around a big square that once held sheep fairs of thousands of animals and now holds antique dealers and pubs. Narrow alleys called tures funnel off it, cut so sheep could be counted through them. The north door of St Edward's church, flanked by two ancient yews grown into the stone arch, is said to have inspired Tolkien's Doors of Durin.

12. 12

    Cotswold pubs and farm shops - eating across the wolds

    food

    The region carries a heavy concentration of ambitious country kitchens, several with Michelin stars, mostly attached to stone inns where you can also sleep upstairs. Underneath the smart end there is a genuine food economy: farm shops selling their own beef and lamb, single-estate creameries, Gloucestershire Old Spot pork, cider from the Severn side and long-established trout farms on the chalk streams. Sunday lunch is the institution to plan around, and it books out.

13. 13

    Snowshill lavender and Painswick's snowdrops - the two flower seasons

    scenic nature wildlife

    High on the hill above Snowshill, a working lavender farm turns several fields deep purple through July, harvested and distilled on site, with the Vale of Evesham spread out below. At the opposite end of the year Painswick's restored rococo garden opens for its snowdrop weeks in late winter, when the beech woods around it carry drifts of them and there is nothing else in the county to look at.

Getting to & around Cotswolds (Bourton-on-the-Water)

Know before you go