Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
edge of a field, or through a woodland in autumn. Deer may be sighted in
some of the larger woodlands and, with a short detour from the way into
Dyrham Park, there's a large herd of fallow deer, reckoned to be one of
the oldest in Britain, while foxes and badgers, rabbits, hares and countless
grey squirrels may all be seen along the way.
Man in the landscape
Man in the landscape could well be the walk's theme. As we have seen, the
Cotswolds have no vast wilderness, no raw mountains or trackless moor-
land; it is not a countryside that threatens or bullies, but one that wel-
comes. Man has lived in harmony with nature for a long time here, using
as a basic building material the very substance of the land, exhibiting a
rare degree of artistry in the moulding of wall, doorway and crooked roof,
until even the villages themselves appear to be an extension of that land,
an integral part of the landscape.
Instead of shunning habitation, as do many other long-distance paths,
the Cotswold Way actively seeks out the timeless villages and towns that
are among the loveliest features of the region. But timeless though they
may seem, they are only comparatively recent additions to a landscape
that has been worked, in some form or another, for 5000 years and more.
The first Cotsallers were nomads, hunter-gatherers who drifted through
what was then a heavily wooded region, but made little visual impact upon
it. It was Neolithic man, around 3000
BC
, who first began to clear patches
in the woodland cover and to till the soil, and in so doing started a prim-
itive form of landscape management. These groups of New Stone Age ag-
riculturalists left behind some 85 burial tombs scattered throughout the
region, among the finest being Hetty Pegler's Tump and Belas Knap, both
on or very close to the Cotswold Way. These ancient relics are typical of
what has become known as the Severn-Cotswold Group: large cairns of
stone with a covering of soil, and internal passageways lined with drystone
walling which open into burial chambers. It has been estimated that some
of these tombs must have involved about 15,000 man-hours to build,
which indicates a surprising level of social involvement and organisation.
