Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
used their great wealth to build some of the grand houses and elegant
churches (complete with lavish stained glass and intricate carvings) that
now form such a feature of the Cotswold Way. Chipping Campden owes
both its charm and its architectural splendour to the wool masters; its
church is a monument built on the proceeds of wool sales, as are those at
Wotton-under-Edge and several other places along the route.
The decline in the export of raw wool began in the early 15th century
with crippling taxes. (Revenue from wool at one time accounted for more
than half of England's fortune.) But this decline was partly addressed by
the home manufacture of cloth, when the new masters of the Cotswolds
were mill owners and middlemen who built fine houses for themselves in
Painswick and the Stroud Valley, taking over from the sheep owners as
financiers of a fresh spate of church building, creating a new middle class
in the process.
In the 17th century the Civil War was fought here, as elsewhere, forcing
a temporary halt in the fortunes that were being made. Along the escarp-
ment several battle sites are passed on the Cotswold Way, among them a
hilltop area still known today as the Battlefields, where the Battle of Lans-
down was fought on 5 July 1643. At the other end of the walk, Campden
House, next to Chipping Campden's parish church, was taken as a garris-
on for Royalist troops, but when they left in 1645 they destroyed it by fire.
Painswick's church still bears signs of a Civil War skirmish, and one of the
last of the battles was fought on the slopes of Dover's Hill.
Between 1700 and 1840 large areas of open land were enclosed by
Acts of Parliament, which brought about the countryside's greatest change
in appearance for hundreds of years. This was when drystone walls and
hedges began to divide the wolds into the criss-cross grid patterns we see
today. Large estates were planted with shelter belts for the raising of game
birds, while the Cotswolds as a whole became much less dependent on
sheep and turned instead to a broader agricultural base with arable land
replacing the sheepwalks of old.
To all intents and purposes, this is the landscape explored by walkers of
the Cotswold Way in the early years of the 21st century.
Music drew me through twilit streets at the end of my first walking of the Cotswold
Way. Rounding a corner I saw a busker in an old raincoat leaning against a wall, scrap-
ing Mozart from his violin. Directly ahead rose Bath Abbey. Deep in shadow below,
bright in floodlight above, it rose out of the darkness into a shaft of white light as a
