When the Cotswolds fall quiet
In high spring, it’s a tourist hotspot. But walk this honeypot in winter and you might get its footpaths all to yourself.
IT’S SAID SNOZELL by locals” explains Sheila, as we’re lacing up our boots in the car park. Try saying ‘Snowshill’ with a Gloucestershire drawl and it makes sense. The only thing puzzling me about this achingly English village, is how eerily empty it seems – as if we’ve stumbled into the post-exodus scenes of a disaster movie. Could there be an impending apocalypse I’m not aware of? It’s a crisp, bauble-bright morning in the Cotswolds and weirdly, we are the only ones here.
Solitude can be a rare thing in this neck of the woods. In peak season, the village’s car park is daily filled by some of the 100,000 or more tourists who roll up to mosey around the National Trust’s Snowshill Manor every year. Others come for the lavender in June. In 2017, they numbered among 2.5 million visitors to the region. But we’re heading out in winter, when the manor shuts up shop and the Cotswolds fall quiet. Thankfully, the pubs, footpaths and bridleways stay open for us hardier types.
In winter, the Cotswolds’ celebrated limestone grasslands aren’t at their best, botanically speaking. But for eye-widening shows of colour,
the winter sun is a worthy understudy for a wildflower ensemble, saturating the hills with a spectrum of mellow ochres and veiling shadows. And if you’re lucky, you might catch the Cotswolds dressed all in white. Few places could be more aptly named for the season than Snowshill.
Two miles outside the tourist hub of Broadway, it’s tucked at the head of a north-facing combe, notched into the Cotswold Edge. Nearly 1000 feet up, it’s thought the village’s name stems from its sheltered position, where winter snows settle first and loiter longest. When we arrive, the hillsides are daubed with the crusty remnants of yesterday’s snow. Elsewhere, it has already melted away.
Wispy tendrils of woodsmoke reach my nose, escaping from a chimney in the village. The honeystoned cottages of Snowshill form a higgledypiggledy cluster around the central churchyard. The tiled rooftops are streaked with snow. Modest by Cotswolds standards, the square-towered, Victorian church found fame in the 2001 film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary. The village was plastered in snow for Rene Zellweger’s Christmas homecoming, but the filmmakers were selling a lie. Shooting took place in the height of summer, requiring truckloads of fake snow to create the effect. According to Sheila, Snowshill wore its big screen outfit for real yesterday, but even with a mere splodging left over, the village is living up to its name.
Old friends of Country Walking, Sheila and Rob Talbot are walking guides and ambassadors for the nearby town of Winchcombe. Back in 2011, Rob created the Winchcombe Way. It’s the trail we’re following as we march off downhill towards Broadway, with the snow squeaking under our boots. Stopping short of the Gloucestershire border (where on the map, a finger of Worcestershire prods its neighbour), we join the Cotswold Way.
One of Britain’s 16 National Trails, it curves south across the west-facing, limestone crest of the Cotswold Edge. We’re 7 miles from its northern trailhead at Chipping Campden. Beginning there, it devotedly traces the crimped piecrust of the Cotswold Hills for 102 miles – every combe and outcrop – all the way down to Bath. Presently, it follows a rutted bridleway, cutting into the 175million-year-old rock beneath our feet. On our left, toothmark hollows pucker the hillside, where this Jurassic limestone was once quarried for tiles or walls. It’s the bedrock which defines the Cotswolds – the shape of hills and the hue of the houses.
Britain’s largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty also owes its character to sheep, which speckle the hillsides as if a clumsy decorator flecked a white paintbrush up a green wall. Their pastures slump into Vale of Evesham – flood plain of the River Avon. 20 miles west, the undulating ridge of the Malvern Hills is ranged on the horizon. Like an island, Bredon Hill breaches the midground
– a geological outstation of the Cotswolds.
Crossing the lip of Shenberrow Hill, the Cotswold Way plunges through a scrubby gulch inhabited by an amiable herd of dinky Dexter cattle. Cows can be unwelcome company on a walk, but not when they’re barely waist-high and sprout four laughably stubby legs. In a race to the nearest stile, my grandmother could beat them by a furlong. Not that they’re the stampeding sort, however – they’re here as stocky, gorse bashers. Snorting clouds of steam into the cold air, their hairy faces gaze bemusedly at us as we break for a spot of lunch. Making tracks, we tail a spring-fed brook down into Stanton.
At the foot of the Cotswold Edge, the village High Street is a well-kempt parade of creamy-gold cottages, festooned with mullioned windows and gabled roofs. Turquoise-tinted ‘Stott’ lanterns are dotted around the village, installed in 1907 by architect Phillip Sidney Stott. Then owner of Stanton, he had set about restoring the village’s houses a year earlier, many of which date back to the 16th and 17th centuries. Tacky giftshops have never darkened the door of Stanton, leaving it quiet and unspoilt – trebly so today. Resisting the temptation for a snifter at The Mount Inn, we carry on our way, tipping our beanie hats to the village cross.
Rounding a bend in the road, the Cotswold Way sends us bobbing across the rippled turf of a medieval ‘ridge and furrow’ field. Low sunlight brings each rise and fall into sharp definition. We follow it into Stanway Park, crossing parallel lines of London Planetrees, which form a magnificent ride sweeping two miles south, ascending to the brow of the Cotswold Edge. Time your arrival here right, and you might glimpse a vintage train wheezing its way over Stanway Viaduct, billowing steam into the atmosphere. A country lane doglegs around Stanway’s Jacobean manor house ( home of the world’s highest gravity-fed fountain). Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie was often in residence during the 1920s. While here, he paid for the village’s thatched cricket pavilion. Impersonating a rustic granary, it’s perched on toadstool saddle stones.
As we turn a corner, Rob suggests a detour into the churchyard of St Peter’s. He’s keeping schtum and won’t let on what’s hidden round the back.
“If you’re lucky, you might catch the Cotswolds dressed all in white. Few places could be more aptly named for the Snowshill.” season than
Ignoring the manor’s grandiose gatehouse, we tiptoe around yew trees and gravestones to investigate. Kept secret from the road, a collage of intricately carved stonemasonry is built into the north wall. This ecclesiastical bric-a-brac, including dismembered statues, arches and a complete coffin, was probably pilfered from Hailes Abbey, located two miles south. A Cistercian house founded in 1246, it fell victim to the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII.
Resuming the Cotswold Way, we tuck behind Stanway’s old water mill and leave the squelchy trail for the solid pavement of a B-road. It brings us to the edge of a wood cloaking the Cotswold escarpment. A mulchy bridle track skims the perimeter, leading us uphill and deeper into the plantation. It’s a muddle of bushy evergreens and bare branches, pronged like lightning. Mosses, ivies and lurid, gummi sweet fungi draw the eye. For one season a year, they aren’t competing with a mass of ramsons or wood anemones.
Set discreetly back from the path, Sheila and Rob point out what must be the most secluded info hut in Cotswolds. Inside, large, colourful maps detail the history of the Stanway Estate. Beyond it, a deceptively steep track is sunk into the hill. It would take a freak Ice Age for us not to break a sweat by the time we emerge at the top.
Back on the Cotswold Edge, the Winchcombe Way eases us down into Snowshill. Lining the lane into the village, the first signs of spring peep through the verges. Since the morning, the snow has melted away to unveil an early sprouting of snowdrop spears. It goes to show that winter is not a slumbering season. It’s a time for fleeting spectacles – when the landscape isn’t dead, just on the turn.
At the very least, winter is a time when you can test a ‘muddy boots welcome’ policy to its limits. And if you can put up with the occasional trudge over claggy ploughland, with mud plastered to the thighs, you could be in for a treat. Because if I’ve learnt anything from our Snowshill sortie, it’s that walking honeypots out of season isn’t all about avoiding crowds. In winter, you get to see what everyone else is missing out on.