In Arcadia
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WHAT a month this is for the Cotswolds. Chestnut trees flowering pink and cream, hawthorn frothing, the world descending on pubs and B&BS for Badminton Horse Trials (page 112)—everything is coming together to make this land of roundshouldered hills as beguiling as it can be.
Everyone falls under its spell. One reason is the stone that lies, in many places, just under the surface of the ground. Easy to work when it is first quarried, it gives a sense of aesthetic unity to even the scruffiest of villages. In past ages, it was carved into shell-shaped hoodmoulds over doors and finials on gate piers, handcrafted details that add subtly to the charm.
There is also the human element. Once an industrial area, where sheep were run to produce wool and golden fleeces woven into cloth, the Cotswolds slept through the Industrial Revolution, when mills moved to the faster-flowing streams of the hillier North of England. By the time it was rediscovered in the 19th century, its old-fashioned farming ways were precisely what made it delightful.
William Morris, founder of the Arts-andcrafts Movement, led the trend. Kelmscott Manor (page 98), recently re-opened after a programme of renovation, represented his domestic ideal. The grey old house by the river seemed to have emerged organically from the ground on which it stood; not an especially grand house, with no architect’s name attached to it, but centuries of continuous habitation by people who cared for the fabric made it harmonious.
In Morris’s wake came the craftsmen and idealists whom he inspired: Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers to Sapperton and C. R. Ashbee with the Guild of Handicraft, which he led to Chipping Campden. Broadway became a summer destination for artists, such as John Singer Sargent and Alfred Parsons, and Edwin Abbey established a studio at Fairford to paint his giant mural cycle for the Boston Public Library in the US. Although William Cobbett despised the Cotswolds for its unproductive agriculture, the area was soon being seen with other, more imaginative eyes (page 104).
Fortunately, people fought its cause. The etcher F. L. Griggs must have infuriated his neighbours at Chipping Campden, but he kept unsightly development at bay. In Moretonin-marsh, the architect Guy Dawber was one of the prime movers of the early CPRE. It is curious to walk the banks of the Thames near Lechlade and see pillboxes left over from the Second World War, standing sentinel over the Cotswolds Arcadia: a vivid reminder that nothing we hold dear will survive unless we defend it.