Читать книгу The Cotswold Way. NATIONAL TRAIL Two-way trail guide - Chipping Campden to Bath онлайн

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Painswick, the ‘white town’ of the Cotswolds (Stage 6, Southbound; Stage 8, Northbound) (photo: Lesley Williams)

I think of honey-coloured cottages, roses wild and nurtured, carpets of bluebells, ramsons and wood anemones, kestrels hovering head-down above the cropped turf, larks warbling from dawn to dusk, a cumulus of sheep on the brow of a distant hill. I remember old churches, Civil War battlefields, and the even older burial mounds and hill forts that pepper the route. I recall beams of sunlight shafting onto the River Severn, clouds rolling over the Black Mountains far away. And the peace. Not silence, but peace. The peace of a countryside comfortable with itself.

A walker’s landscape is both a powerful stimulant and an inspiration. Certainly that is true where memories and dreams intertwine in a complex of pleasures on completion of the Cotswold Way.

The Cotswold Way

The Cotswold Way measures 102 miles (163km) on its journey from Chipping Campden to Bath, and it’s a devious route – a switchback, stuttering, to-ing and fro-ing, climbing and falling walk. For newcomers to long-distance walking, it may come as a surprise to find how demanding it can be. One moment you’re wandering along the scarp edge, with toy-sized farms and villages scattered across the plains far below, the next you’re heading down to them – to explore a magical village, or a small market town with age in its streets, whose cottages are ‘faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them’. Then you head up again, zigzagging back and forth in order to capture the best the wolds can offer.