Cotswolds
Based on Wikipedia: Cotswolds
The Hills That Built England's Wool Fortune
Somewhere in the rolling hills of central England, there's a stone that glows. Not literally, of course, but the honey-colored limestone of the Cotswolds has a peculiar quality that the novelist J.B. Priestley described perfectly in 1934: even under cold, overcast skies, the walls seem "faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them."
This is not poetic exaggeration. The Cotswolds occupy a strange place in the English imagination—a region that feels almost too picturesque to be real, where villages look like they emerged organically from the earth rather than being built upon it. And in a sense, they did.
A Landscape Written in Stone
The Cotswolds stretch diagonally across England, running roughly ninety miles from just south of Stratford-upon-Avon—yes, Shakespeare's town—down to the outskirts of Bath. The region sprawls across six counties, though it's mostly concentrated in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. At its widest, it spans about twenty-five miles.
What makes this area distinctive is what lies beneath it: Jurassic limestone, laid down when this part of England sat beneath a warm, shallow sea some 170 million years ago. This isn't just geological trivia. That ancient seabed created a type of rock called oolitic limestone—named from the Greek word for egg, because it's composed of tiny spherical grains that look like fish roe under a microscope. When you quarry this stone and build with it, you get walls that range from pale cream to deep gold, depending on where exactly you dig.
The color gradient runs north to south. Villages in the northern Cotswolds, like Broadway and Stanton, have that famous honey tone. Move to the center, around Cirencester and Dursley, and the stone turns more golden. Travel all the way to Bath, and the buildings gleam almost pearly white.
This stone is also remarkably rich in fossils. Sea urchins are particularly common—their calcified tests, as scientists call their shells, turn up regularly when the rock is split. In 2021, a quarry in the Cotswolds yielded the largest excavation of Jurassic period echinoderm fossils ever recorded, including species that had never been seen before.
The Name That Nobody Quite Agrees On
The etymology of "Cotswolds" has been debated for centuries. The popular explanation sounds plausible enough: "sheep enclosure in rolling hillsides." The "wold" part is straightforward—it's an Old English word for rolling, forested hills, related to "Weald," the great wooded region of southeastern England.
But what about "Cots"?
The English Place-Name Society, which studies these things with the methodical patience of medieval monks cataloguing saints, concluded decades ago that the name comes from "Cod's wold"—meaning the high open land belonging to someone named Cod. This personal name appears in other local place names dating back to the eighth century: Cutsdean, Codeswellan, Codesbyrig.
Here's where it gets interesting. More recently, scholars have noticed that "Cod" might not be an Anglo-Saxon man's name at all. It could derive from "Cuda," a hypothetical Celtic goddess who may have been worshipped in this region before the Romans arrived, let alone the English. The Cotswolds, in other words, might be named after a deity we know almost nothing about—a mother goddess whose existence we can only infer from linguistic shadows.
The Escarpment and the Dip
If you approach the Cotswolds from the west, from the Severn Valley, you'll notice something dramatic: the land rises sharply, almost cliff-like in places. This is the Cotswold Edge, or Cotswold Escarpment, and it represents the exposed, broken edge of that great limestone layer.
Geologists have a term for this formation: a cuesta. Think of it as a tilted tabletop. The western edge, where the rock was uplifted and fractured, presents a steep face to the world. The eastern side slopes gradually downward—the "dip slope"—toward the Thames Valley and Oxford.
The highest point is Cleeve Hill, just east of Cheltenham, rising to 1,083 feet. That's not particularly impressive by global standards, but it's enough to create distinct microclimates and habitats. Cleeve Hill is also one of the few places in the Cotswolds where the rock outcrops are solid enough for rock climbing, at a spot called Castle Rock.
How Sheep Built Churches
The Cotswolds have been inhabited for a very long time. Neolithic burial chambers dot the Cotswold Edge, some dating back five thousand years. Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples built hillforts here. The Romans established villas at places like Chedworth—one of the best-preserved Roman sites in Britain—and built roads, including the Fosse Way, which ran straight as an arrow from Exeter to Lincoln, passing directly through the Cotswolds.
But the era that truly shaped the region, that built the villages we photograph today, was the medieval wool trade.
Between roughly 1250 and 1350, the Cotswolds became one of the wealthiest areas in England. The reason was a particular breed of sheep known as the Cotswold Lion—large animals with heavy, lustrous fleeces that produced wool of exceptional quality. This wool was in enormous demand on the continent, particularly in the textile centers of Flanders and Italy. Italian merchants traveled to the Cotswolds to buy fleeces directly from English producers.
The wealth that accumulated here found expression in stone. Wool merchants built manor houses. They expanded villages. And most conspicuously, they funded the construction of churches far grander than any rural community would normally possess. These "wool churches" still stand throughout the Cotswolds—soaring buildings with elaborate towers, fine tracery windows, and carved details that speak of money lavished on the glory of God and, not incidentally, the prestige of the donors.
The wool trade declined after the fourteenth century, but its architectural legacy remained, frozen in honey-colored stone.
The Arts and Crafts Refuge
By the late nineteenth century, the Cotswolds had become something they'd never quite been before: unfashionable. Industry had passed them by. The railways touched only the edges of the region. The stone villages that had once represented wealth now represented backwardness, isolation, and poverty.
This made them perfect for artists and intellectuals fleeing industrial England.
William Morris, the designer, poet, and socialist who founded the Arts and Crafts movement, occasionally lived in Broadway Tower—a decorative folly built in 1798 on one of the highest points in the Cotswolds. Morris and his followers believed that the industrial revolution had degraded both craftsmen and their products, that the machine-made goods flooding Victorian markets were ugly, soulless, and dehumanizing. They sought a return to traditional craftsmanship, to the kind of careful hand-work that had built the Cotswold churches and cottages.
Chipping Campden became particularly associated with the movement. The Guild of Handicraft relocated there from London in 1902, bringing silversmiths, woodworkers, and other artisans. The town preserves this heritage today.
Chipping Campden is also home to something much older: the Cotswold Olimpick Games. Not a typo—these games predate the modern Olympics by about 250 years. They were founded in the early seventeenth century and feature such traditional English sports as shin-kicking, which is exactly what it sounds like.
A Protected Landscape
In 1966, the British government designated a large portion of the Cotswolds as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB. This status, roughly equivalent to a National Park but with fewer restrictions, aimed to protect the region's character from inappropriate development.
The protected area covers 787 square miles, making it the largest such designation in England. In 2023, all Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty were rebranded as "National Landscapes," though the legal framework remains unchanged.
What exactly is being protected? The obvious answer is the visual landscape—the stone villages, the dry-stone walls (over four thousand miles of them), the rolling farmland. But the designation also protects something less visible: the rare limestone grassland habitats that exist here because of the underlying geology.
Limestone grasslands are increasingly scarce in England. They support species that can't survive elsewhere, including the Duke of Burgundy butterfly, a small, orange-and-brown creature that was once common across England but has declined by over eighty percent since the 1970s. Cleeve Hill and its surrounding commons remain one of the few places where you can reliably find them.
The Cotswolds also contain old-growth beech woodlands, five European Special Areas of Conservation, three national nature reserves, and more than eighty Sites of Special Scientific Interest. This is not merely a pretty place. It's an ecological refuge.
The Village Names
Part of the Cotswolds' charm lies in its place names, which read like a catalog of Englishness refined to concentrated form: Bourton-on-the-Water, Stow-on-the-Wold, Moreton-in-Marsh, Chipping Norton, Chipping Campden, Wotton-under-Edge.
The "Chipping" prefix appears repeatedly. It comes from the Old English "ceaping," meaning market—these were market towns. "Wold" refers to the upland forests. "Marsh" often indicated a boundary marker, not necessarily a wetland. These names are linguistic fossils, preserving medieval England in syllables.
Bourton-on-the-Water, with its low bridges spanning the River Windrush as it flows through the village center, receives roughly 300,000 visitors per year—about half staying for less than a day. Broadway, Bibury, and Stanton appear in virtually every guidebook. On summer weekends, the most famous villages can feel more like theme parks than living communities.
The Economics of Prettiness
Tourism generates approximately one billion pounds annually for the broader Cotswolds region, supporting around 200,000 jobs. In 2016, the area recorded 38 million day visits. The Cotswold Way, a 93-mile walking trail from Bath to Chipping Campden, draws hikers from around the world.
But the Cotswolds are not simply a museum. Roughly eighty percent of the National Landscape area is farmland—primarily barley, wheat, beans, and rapeseed, along with sheep that are the descendants, however distant, of those medieval Cotswold Lions. The livestock sector has been declining since 2002, but agriculture remains central to the landscape's character.
The other major economic force is, perhaps unsurprisingly, wealth itself. The Cotswolds have become a favored destination for affluent Londoners seeking second homes or retirement properties. This has driven up housing costs, altered village demographics, and created a curious tension: the region's beauty attracts people who can afford to buy into it, which changes the nature of what they're buying into.
A 2018 Local Plan approved the construction of nearly seven thousand additional homes by 2031, in towns like Cirencester, Bourton-on-the-Water, and Moreton-in-Marsh. Development fees will fund infrastructure improvements, but the question of how much growth the Cotswolds can absorb while remaining recognizably themselves has no easy answer.
The Question of National Park Status
In 2018, the Cotswolds Conservation Board formally requested that the region be considered for National Park status—a significant upgrade from Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Environment Secretary Michael Gove had announced a review of whether some AONBs merited elevation.
The proposal sparked debate. National Park status would bring additional funding and recognition. It would also shift certain planning decisions away from local district councils to a Park Authority. One Cotswold District councillor noted that this would mean "key decision making powers being taken away from democratically elected councillors"—specifically, the authority to approve or reject housing applications.
The tension is genuine. Local control allows communities to shape their own futures. But it also allows political pressures that might prioritize short-term interests over long-term preservation. There's no obviously correct answer.
What the Stone Remembers
The Cotswolds exist in a peculiar temporal state. The villages look much as they did centuries ago—not because they've been preserved as relics, but because the building material itself enforces continuity. New construction uses the same limestone. Repairs match what was already there. The vernacular architecture perpetuates itself.
This creates an illusion of timelessness that isn't quite accurate. The medieval wool merchants are gone. So are the conditions that made their wealth possible. The Arts and Crafts idealists who fled here from industrial modernity are gone too, though their workshops survive. The agricultural economy that once sustained these villages has transformed beyond recognition.
What remains is the stone—golden, honey-colored, luminous even under gray skies. And the hills, rising and falling in that particular Cotswold rhythm. And the grasslands, where Duke of Burgundy butterflies still dance over flowers that grow nowhere else.
The Cotswolds are not frozen in time. They're something more interesting: a landscape where the past is constantly being reinterpreted through the present, where beauty and commerce and ecology and history all intersect in complicated ways. The stone remembers everything. It just keeps that memory glowing, warm and golden, in the English light.