Short Break in the Cotswolds
FAMILY REUNIONS often take place in December; it enables one to hand over presents, and make savings on postage. On leaving a daughter‘s house near Oxford to meet up with other family members, we drove west through swirling fog. We urged the shafts of sunlight to dissipate the mist and reveal the broad uplands of the Cotswolds.
At Stow on the Wold, the area’s highest town, the bare hills or ‘wolds’ where the stone villages seem to merge into the landscape, were finally visible. Between the hills, mysterious-looking, mist-filled valleys enticed us westwards. Our meeting place was the ancient town of Winchcombe, one of England‘s major Saxon capitals.
My parents chose the town for their retirement home, and my artist mother spent many happy hours painting the gently rolling countryside with its profusion of mellow villages. Winchcombe once boasted an abbey, founded in the 8th century by King Kenulf of Mercia. |
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In the 15th century a huge parish church was built by the town’s wealthy merchants close to the abbey. The story goes that vigorous bell-ringing from its tower disturbed the monks, who sent a deputation to the pope asking him to forbid the townspeople to ring while they were at prayer. Such protracted journeys were not unusual at that time!
The abbey was totally destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII while the parish church survives. We were pleased to see that the carpet round the font designed by my mother nearly 30 years ago is still in position, its dancing lambs reminding one of the area’s major industry over many hundreds of years.
The Woolsack, the Lord Chancellor’s seat in the House of Lords, was so-named in the Middle Ages in recognition of the ever-increasing importance of wool to England‘s economy. Before the Norman Conquest, Cotswold wool was being exported to Flanders and Italy, and this continued for centuries.
Merchants such as William Grevel of Chipping Campden, the ‘flower of the wool merchants of all England’, became immensely rich, building fine homes, and churches to house their handsome memorials. The most prestigious merchants belonged to the Fellowship of the Staple, based in Calais which belonged to the English. They fixed the price of the wool as it passed through the port.
Edward III invited Flemish weavers to come and instruct the English in their craft, and in the southern Cotswolds mills were built on the fast-flowing streams. By the 18th century things had begun to change as there were dangers in an area being dependent on just one trade.
With the industrial revolution manufacture of cloth moved to Yorkshire, and the Cotswolds became a beautiful but crumbling backwater. We can wander through its ancient communities and sense the past, as there was no money for insensitive Victorian restoration. The founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings by William Morris and his friends in 1879 eventually ensured their survival.
Visitors admire the buildings‘ traditional style, with steep-pitched roofs and dormers, while many windows have mullions. Stone colour varies from deep gold in the north to silver grey in the south. Even the slates are stone, increasing in size from top to bottom of the roof.
There are numerous quarries high in the hills where the limestone is very close to the surface; cutting the stone for the roof is a craft demanding great skill. The earliest example of a stonemason‘s work is in Belas Knap, a 4,000 year old long barrow in the hills above Winchcombe.
The Cotswolds are an area to savour at leisure, gazing at buildings, enjoying shops and galleries, or walking long distance paths such as the Cotswold Way. Winchcombe makes a splendid centre from which to explore.
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