Long Weekend In The Cotswolds, 5-7 June 2017

An account of a somewhat dampish Bed and Breakfast weekend in the Cotswolds, UK. History, lovely scenery, abbeys and tea rooms with a spot of gentle humour.

Click the photos for each article.

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Rain at Random in Chipping Campden

Monday 5 June 2017. We had left Evesham and are now in a very picturesque market town called Chipping Campden. Unfortunately the rain is still with us too...

In moving from Evesham we have crossed from Worcestershire into Gloucestershire, but so subtle was the crossing that we never even noticed... Chipping Campden is another of the towns built with that lovely honey-coloured Cotswolds limestone.

We passed a little door with worn lettering over it. It reads: "SCHOLA GRAMMATICA 1487 J.F." Despite the date, the building dates back only to the 1620s. The school had been originally founded in the 1400s it is true but probably around 1440. What the significance of 1487 was has been lost. Schooldays were a mere twelve hours long when the school was new.

From the days when recommendation by way of recognition by the Automobile Association was thought to require signs a little more impressive than a small placque on the wall. The A.A. started recognising quality in hotels back in 1908 and introduced the star system a little later in 1912.

As we walked down the high street a woman walked towards us with two dogs. They were just absolutely gorgeous. If there was to be a new film about Enid Blyton's Famous Five then they were the spitting image of illustrator Eileen Soper's Timmy. I couldn't help exclaiming and came away from the encounter with somewhat licked hands... The dogs had joined in too...

I had been hoping to revisit a tiny but haphazardly crammed museum that we saw (on another rainy day) some twenty years ago. I couldn't remember just where it was so we entered the tiny Tourist Information Office just in time to be greeted with a strident clarion call from one of the two staff. "I heard that!" exclaimed the other one jovially, then noticed us and the subject changed suddenly. I explained (as quickly as I could) what we were looking for, but apparently the museum had closed some time ago. A great shame. [cough] Right... we'll be off then...

The High Street has an old market hall, that we will see shortly, which stands on a little island of space between the High Street and a little road that cuts off round the back of the hall rejoining the High Street at the other end. We turned round at this point as the rain was getting harder and Miss Franny had spotted a tea room where we could get shelter and a spot of tiffin.

Chipping Campden market hall. The town was a centre of the wool trade in the Middle Ages. The market hall dates from 1627.

The cobble stones of the floor have worn a little unevenly over the last 500 years but the hall is still as impressive as it must have been in the days when you couldn't move for stalls of balls of Sirdar and knitting patterns with a young Roger Moore modelling cardigans. Who knows what sordid acts people got up to? A sign at one end warns: "No persons shall cause annoyance to others using the market hall by improper acts." There you are... do it proper...!

By this time Miss Franny is standing impatiently outside the Bantam Tea Rooms into which you descend from the High Street by way of a few steps. Hmmm... Perhaps that's why it's called the high street...

Once inside we found a table near the old unused fireplace and were soon getting ourselves around tea and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream. Sigh...

Cotswolds Holiday Index

A Yarn of William Shakespeare

For the last time... Sunday 5 June 1994. This entry finishes the tale of our long weekend in the Cotswolds. If you've been following this holiday you will know that after mixed weather, the day we have to go home is the most gorgeous British summer's day and we have stopped off here and there on our way home. We are heading north and out of the Cotswolds now.

The yarn of the title comes from this - the ancient yarn market at Chipping Campden. It was a market, meeting place, somewhere dry to shelter from rain and ancient pestilence and generally a spot where local elders could gather and moan about teenagers and the lack of a decent day care centre...

One chap in 1437 sat there for a full week thinking it was a bus shelter, before someone told him buses hadn't been invented yet. Once they had been invented three turned up at once...

We had dinner in a pub and then went into the local museum which was so crammed full of things that the presentation didn't make sense! But who cares? It was like rummaging through a junk shop without a single uninteresting thing to find. It was brill!

The old projectors from the local cinema, probably closed down in the 1930s at the end of the silent era, were resplendent in one room with a pile of clutter around them, only some of which was relevant to the world of film. A huge balloon of the wicker basket type was propped up in one room, as apparently a local, before the days of flight, decided man could and should fly and built this contraption to prove it.

I can't believe I've never made it back there, the place was a goldmine of treasure! We carried on north and into Warwickshire, coming to this delightful cottage, familiar through countless Christmas biscuit and chocolate selection box lids and jigsaws.

Quite how William Shakespeare ever managed to find a bit of peace to woo Anne Hathaway amidst all those hordes of Japanese and American tourists flocking all over the gardens I'll never know.

"Sweet William, let us take to the sun lounger and ... lounge..."
"Hark! What is this I see before me? A camera lens? Oy! Piss off!!!" It couldn't have been easy...

A couple of miles further and we are in the centre of Stratford-upon-Avon - always a good trivia question to trap the unwary: what's the name of the river that runs through Stratford-upon-Avon? Almost as good as: what's the name of the ship in Mutiny on the Bounty?

Anyway, this is Shakespeare's birthplace. In the house, rather than on the pavement we hope. You can imagine him as a boy staring out of the bedroom window and saying "Those patterned bricks in the road look nice now, but I bet it won't be long before they're tripping people up..."

And so, in a blaze of wordly thought, a tumultuous crescendo of prose and textly passage (Shakespeare wasn't above making up words so why shouldn't I?), we end this tale of Cotswoldian (see!!!) wanderings and head off back up to Blackpool. Forsooth... and Roger, Sooth's lodger...

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