The Cotswolds
The Cotswolds' honey-coloured villages were paid for by sheep, and the fleeces that made them rich were nicknamed 'the golden fleece' of medieval England.
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Quick Facts
- Location
- A limestone upland running roughly 90 miles from near Chipping Campden in the north-east to near Bath in the south-west, taking in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire
- Size
- About 790 square miles, up to around 25 miles wide, making it England's largest National Landscape
- Designated
- Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1966; renamed a National Landscape in 2023
- Highest point
- Cleeve Hill, about 330 metres (1,083 ft)
- Built from
- Jurassic oolitic limestone, laid down roughly 170 million years ago
- Long-distance trail
- The Cotswold Way, 102 miles from Chipping Campden to Bath, opened in 1970
- Famous for
- Wool churches, drystone walls, honey-coloured villages such as Bibury and Bourton-on-the-Water
- Oldest tradition
- Robert Dover's Cotswold Olimpicks, begun around 1612 on Dover's Hill
The sheep that built the postcard
Almost everything you photograph in the Cotswolds was paid for by wool. In the Middle Ages, fleeces from the local breed, the long-woolled Cotswold sheep, were among the most prized in Europe. The breed earned the nickname 'Cotswold Lion' for its shaggy, mane-like fleece. Merchants shipped wool to Flanders and Italy and came home rich. They built grand houses, market halls and enormous churches in what were otherwise modest market towns. When the wool trade faded, the money dried up too. Few places had the cash to knock old buildings down and start again, which is a big reason so many villages still look as they did centuries ago.
Why the stone looks like honey
The Cotswolds' oolitic limestone formed in warm, shallow Jurassic seas about 170 million years ago. Its rounded grains, called ooids, grew as layers of calcium carbonate built up around tiny nuclei such as sand grains or shell fragments. The stone is easy to cut when freshly quarried and hardens with exposure. Because the stone is local, the villages seem to grow out of the land. The colour shifts across the region: warm golden tones in the north and east, paler and silvery as you head south. Look up and you will often see stone roofs too. The steep pitch of traditional Cotswold stone-slate roofs sheds water quickly and keeps the overlapping, irregular slates weatherproof. Their considerable weight calls for sturdy roof timbers beneath.
Churches that were really trophies
Cotswold 'wool churches' are famously out of scale with their villages. Chipping Campden, Northleach and Cirencester all have soaring Perpendicular Gothic churches, funded by merchants who wanted to show off and secure their place in heaven. In Chipping Campden's church you can see the brass of William Grevel, who died in 1401. It describes him as the 'flower of the wool merchants of all England'. His house still stands on the High Street. It is a good reminder that the Cotswolds' beauty began as commerce, not as an attempt at prettiness.
Shin-kicking and runaway cheese
The Cotswolds have some of Britain's oddest sporting traditions. Robert Dover, a Jacobean lawyer, started his Cotswold Olimpicks around 1612 on Dover's Hill above Chipping Campden. The games have included wrestling, jumping, and the unforgiving sport of shin-kicking. They are still held each year. On the Gloucestershire edge of the hills, Cooper's Hill hosts the cheese-rolling, in which competitors hurl themselves down a ferociously steep slope after a rolling Double Gloucester. The first person to the bottom wins the cheese. Both events prove the Cotswolds are not all tea shops and quiet lanes.
Myth versus reality: is it untouched countryside?
The Cotswolds feel timeless, but the landscape is largely man-made. Centuries of sheep grazing created the open, grassy hillsides, and farmers and wallers built thousands of miles of drystone walls, using no mortar, to divide the fields. Nor is it a single place. It is a limestone upland that tilts gently east and drops sharply to the west in a steep escarpment, with views over the Severn Vale from spots such as Cleeve Hill, the highest point. To see it properly, walk some of the Cotswold Way, which runs along the escarpment, and then explore the villages. Look for the pattern of walls, the mullioned windows, the shape of the roofs, and Arlington Row in Bibury, a row of cottages that began life as a medieval wool store and was converted into weavers' homes. In Bourton-on-the-Water, the low bridges over the River Windrush have earned the village the nickname 'Venice of the Cotswolds'.
Notable people
- Robert Dover
- William Grevel
- William Morris
- Laurie Lee
Test yourself
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Blenheim Palace
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