Cotswolds

Saturday, 9 November - Sunday, 10 November 2019

Saturday, 9 November 2019
We woke up to rain.  I don't mean the drizzly light rain that we have pretty much become accustomed to and learned to ignore.  This was the full-up rain with large raindrops and making puddles.  The forecast doesn't look good, but there is much to see and we can't save it all for tomorrow.  Obviously we will postpone the hike I want to do, but there are a couple of towns to walk around.  We decided to put on our rain gear, including our rain pants and try to walk around at least one of the towns and see how it goes.

We ate breakfast and headed out to Chipping Campden.  Chipping Campden was once home to the richest wool merchants in the area, so money was spent to make the main street in town worthy of living in.  All the buildings on the street was built using honey-colored limestone quarried nearby and called Cotswold stone.

Here is the Market Hall, built in 1627. This is the Cotswold stone that I talked about.

Here is a view up High Street from the dryness inside the Market Hall. At this point it is raining pretty hard.

One of Tim's artsy shots out the Market Hall archway.

The tour book mentioned that we can go inside the Tourist Information office, located inside the old police station, and ask to see the Magistrate's Courtroom upstairs.  Sounds like a plan to get out of this rain.  The courtroom was just a large room with nothing too spectacular, but we were warmer and drier and Tim got a nice view out the window.

We left and continued our walking tour that pointed out features on some of the limestone buildings.  See the black cast-iron fixtures on either side of the front door of the building below?  This building, called "Green Dragons," used to be the horse stable for visitors to use.  The cast-iron fixtures were inside the stable to hold hay for the horses to eat.

Here are a couple of nice photos taken as we walked down High Street.

This is the Grevel House, Chipping Campden's first stone house, built in 1367 by William Greval, a sheep tycoon.

The last stop on the walking tour is St. James Church.  These old rich towns of course have majestic, beautiful churches to go along with them.  The church, like the town, was built by wool.  When we arrived at the church they were getting ready for a memorial service, so we just peeked in and left.

Well...we have been out in this rain for over 1.15 hours and there are no signs of it slowing down.  We are soaked.

There is no way we can walk around another town, so I looked up "brewery" on Google Maps and up popped Boat Lane Brewery, less than 20 minutes away.  What a great find.  The owner/brewer was fun to talk to, as were the two local chaps having a beer.  Plus, they had a nice wood burning stove keeping the place warm.

Boat Lane Brewery, Offenham, England, 9 November 2019

After the flight we headed to a market and picked up a couple of frozen pizzas and salad for dinner.  We then returned to our awesome AirBnB, changed out of our wet clothes, and enjoyed an evening of TV and pizza.  The rain is supposed to stop by the morning, so we should be able to check out a couple more cute Cotswold towns and do a hike.  We will just have to wait and see.

Sunday, 10 November 2019
We woke up and it wasn't raining...woohoo!  We quickly got up, showered, ate breakfast, and left the AirBnB around 10 AM.  Thanks to yesterday's rain, we have a lot to see and do today.  This wouldn't be so bad in the summer, but the sun sets here around 4 PM, so we are racing the sunset.

First stop is the cute town of Stow-on-the-Wold, translated to "meeting place on the uplands."  This is the highest point of the Cotswolds and it feels like it...burrrr.  We parked the car and walked into town.  As soon as we arrived they were getting ready to start their Remembrance Sunday parade.  Remembrance Sunday is the Sunday closest to Novemer 11th (Remembrance Day). 

We felt pretty lucky to arrive just in time.  Here are old military vehicles leading the parade followed by the pipe band:

Behind the band were veterans followed by children:

It was really nice to be able to witness this parade.

After the parade we headed to the start of the walking tour, the market square. Starting in 1107, Stow-on-the-Wold was the site of an international fair, where people came from as far as Italy to shop for wool fleeces.  According to the tour book, as many as 20,000 sheep sold per day during the fair.

On the market square was stocks were people were publicly punished...do I really deserve this?!?

Th Porch House Hotel, dating from 947, claims to be the oldest in England (along with about 20 others).

We turned up Sheep Street which used to be a staging area for the medieval sheep markets.  The sheep used to be staged here and paraded down narrow alleys into the market square.  Here are a couple of those alleys:

As we were walking towards St. Edward's Church all the cars stopped.  We then realized that it was November 11th at 11 AM.  This was the 2 minutes of silence for Remembrance Day.

After 2 minutes was up, we completed our walk to the church.

St. Edward's Church is a nice stately looking church, but it was outside the back door that is cool.  Check out this old wooden door flanked by two ancient yew trees.  There is some thought, although unproven, that J.R.R. Tolkien got his inspiration for the Doors of Durin, from this location.

Another artistic photo by Tim:

Back to the car and onto the next cute town of Bourton-on-the-Water, a picturesque town that has quaint canals running along its main street.

Because of the quaintness, this place is supposedly a nightmare in the summertime...one of the reasons we like to travel off-season.  We walked around a bit and shared a Fish & Chips before heading off to our next stop.

We drove 25 minutes to Stanton.  This is the start of what is supposed to be a 6 mile hike.  The issue is that it is now about 2 PM and the sun goes down around 4 PM, so that only gives us 2 hours of daylight.  In the middle of the hike there is a shortcut back to town, so we do have an out if we need it, so we left the parking lot and headed through town, and what a cute town.

There were even some people riding horses through town.  We wound up seeing them later in the day during our hike.

Here I am headed towards the trail:

This is a signpost marking the "Cotswold Way."  This trail is 102 miles long and runs from Chipping Campton to Bath.  Our hike today follows the Cotswold Way for a bit.

Here are some shots of our beautiful hike.

Well...unfortunately there wasn't going to be enough daylight for us to complete the whole 6 miles, so we shortened it to around 3-4 miles.  When we returned to town we went into the local pub to warm up and grab a pint.  The fire burning went perfectly with the pint.

After the pint we headed back to the car.  It is so cool that all the houses in this small town are built using the Cotswold stone.

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On the way back to the car, we actually found a couple of geocaches.  We have found a few of these throughout this trip.

 Here is a shot Tim got out the window of the car while we were driving back to the AirBnB.

This is our third and last night at this wonderful AirBnB.  We didn't take a photo of it, so I grabbed a shot off the AirBnB website:

Nice...right?!?  We enjoyed the last night by making tortellini, garlic bread, and salad. We did the laundry, and watched TV.  Tomorrow is a full day with a surprise stop for Tim, so we have to get up early.  With that...until tomorrow.