Beyond the Itinerary are stories from the places we’re going — and the things that stay with us. Sole Sister travel adventures take care of the itinerary. The things that happen beyond it are up to all of us.
How can somewhere you’ve never been feel strangely familiar?
I have never been to the Cotswolds, and yet I have a pretty clear picture of what I think they look like.
Honey-coloured stone cottages, roses around doorways, narrow lanes bordered by hedgerows, church spires, sheep grazing in very green fields and, naturally, a pub that looks as though it has been serving weary travellers for several hundred years.
I blame books and British television.
If, like me, you grew up reading English literature and have watched your share of British period dramas, chances are you have your own version of this England tucked away in your imagination.
So, as Sole Sister Ramblers gets ready to head to the Cotswolds, I started wondering how much of the place I think I know actually exists—and how it came to look that way in the first place.
It turns out there is quite a story behind all that prettiness.
A Landscape Built by Sheep
Let's start with the sheep.
For centuries, the rolling hills of the Cotswolds supported enormous flocks, and by the Middle Ages, Cotswold wool had become highly prized. The wool trade brought considerable wealth to the region, and you can apparently still see evidence of that prosperity all over the place.
Some of the surprisingly grand churches found in small Cotswold communities are known as “wool churches,” built or expanded with money from merchants who had made their fortunes in the trade.
Even those famous golden cottages have a story. Cotswold limestone has been quarried locally for centuries, which explains why so many of the villages look as though they grew right out of the countryside. In a way, they did. The buildings and the land around them are made from the same stone.
I love knowing things like this before I go somewhere. It means that when I eventually find myself standing in front of one of those lovely old churches, I'll know to look at it a little more closely.
The England We Think We Know
Then there are the books.
The English countryside has been part of our literary imagination for centuries. Country houses, village greens, rectories, gardens, footpaths and pubs have provided the backdrop for so many stories that it can be difficult to separate the real England from the one we've been reading about all our lives.
The Cotswolds have their own literary connections. Laurie Lee grew up in the Gloucestershire village of Slad and later wrote about his childhood there in Cider with Rosie. William Morris, one of the leading figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, fell in love with the area and was particularly taken with the village of Bibury.
And no, Jane Austen wasn't a Cotswolds novelist. But I still wouldn't be remotely surprised to see Elizabeth Bennet striding purposefully along one of those footpaths.
Books do that to us. They allow us to form relationships with places we've never actually seen.
Maybe that's part of the reason I'm so intrigued by the Cotswolds.
So What's the Appeal?
Obviously, they're beautiful. I'm not going to pretend the cottages, gardens and villages aren't a huge part of why people want to go there.
But I suspect there's something else going on too.
So much of our world is built around getting somewhere quickly. We drive rather than walk. Buildings go up and come down. Bigger and newer are generally considered better.
Then you have a place where old footpaths still connect villages, stone walls divide fields, and buildings have been repaired and adapted for generations.
There's something very appealing about that.
Of course, I also know that the Cotswolds aren't a movie set. People actually live there, and I'm sure life in a rural English village bears only a passing resemblance to the version of it I've absorbed through books and television.
I'm looking forward to seeing the difference.
Getting There on Foot
One of the things I'm most curious about is England's network of public footpaths.
Rather than driving from one famous Cotswolds village to the next, we'll be walking through the countryside between them, crossing farmland, going through gates and over stiles and following paths that people have used for generations.
I suspect that's where we'll really begin to see the place.
We'll pass the fields that supported the villages, the old stone walls that divided them and the church towers that helped people find their way. And then there will be all the completely ordinary things that no one thinks to put in a travel brochure: someone's garden spilling over a wall, an old graveyard, a handwritten sign at the end of a driveway or a field full of sheep who couldn't care less that a group of Canadian women has just wandered past.
Hopefully there will also be a pub at the end of the path. I'm counting on that.
Beyond the Postcard
I have absolutely no objection to seeing the postcard version of the Cotswolds. I want the cottages, gardens, villages and little stone bridges. I fully expect to take far too many photographs.
But I also want to know what I'm looking at.
That's really what Beyond the Itinerary is about.
Before we travel somewhere, we want to poke around a little. Why does this place look the way it does? Who lived here? What happened here? What are the stories we might completely miss if we didn't know to look for them?
So when we eventually walk into one of those villages, perhaps we'll look at that beautiful old church and wonder whether wool money helped build it. We'll recognize why the cottages have that particular golden colour. And when we're walking an old footpath from one village to another, we'll know we're hardly the first people to make the journey.
I think knowing a little bit of the story beforehand makes arriving somewhere much more interesting.
Now I want to see how much of the Cotswolds I've been carrying around in my imagination is actually there.
Come Ramble With Us
Sole Sister Ramblers is heading to the Cotswolds, and one of the things I like most about this Ramble is that many of us will be discovering it for the first time together.
We'll have the rolling countryside, beautiful villages, gardens, history, old churches, and plenty of time spent walking between them. There will almost certainly be sheep, and I'm reasonably confident we'll find a pub or two.
And then there will be all the things we don't know about yet.
Those are the parts I'm most looking forward to.
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