Is the Cotswold Way hard? An honest guide

The Cotswold Way is a hundred miles of limestone edge, villages and beech woods, and nowhere on it is high. It is still harder than it looks on a map, for one reason: it keeps climbing back onto the edge. Here is what the numbers say, and what they leave out.

The numbers

Distance

103 mi

165 km, measured on our line

High point

316 m

Cleeve Hill

Total climb

3,609 m

from LIDAR terrain; a floor, not a ceiling

The highest ground is Cleeve Hill, 316 metres at the trig point by our terrain, and the biggest single climb is about 220 metres, from Winchcombe up to Belas Knap. The total over the whole walk is about 3,600 metres by our measurement from the Environment Agency's laser survey: more than the South Downs Way, in a similar distance. Spread over the planner's nine days, that is about 400 metres of climbing a day. It counts only the rises our survey resolves, so other published figures can be higher; ours is a floor.

What makes it hard anyway

The climbs onto the edge. The trail runs along the Cotswold escarpment, but not along its top all the way: it drops to villages below and climbs back up, several times a day. None is long. The National Trail's own warning is that walkers are surprised by how often they climb. In the planner's nine-day split the hardest day is King's Stanley to the Tyndale Monument, 20 kilometres with about 630 metres of climb.

Mud under the edge. The clay below the escarpment holds water, and in winter and after rain the paths along it are heavy going.

Water on the last day and a half. The map has seventeen taps within 400 metres of the Way, but none from Wotton-under-Edge to Bath, 31 miles. The villages have water; the path does not.

What makes it easier than you think

Villages. The Way drops into a village most days, and villages have pubs and shops. The one long stretch without a food shop is the edge above Cheltenham, from Charlton Kings to Painswick, 18 miles.

The paths and the waymarking. The paths are good and the trail is waymarked throughout, in either direction.

The finish. Bath has a main-line station 500 metres from the Abbey, with two trains an hour to London. The start is the awkward end: Chipping Campden has no station, and the way in is by bus from Moreton-in-Marsh, or 5.5 kilometres from Honeybourne. Those are checked, with the dates on the guide.

So who is it for?

If you can walk twelve miles a day with a few steep climbs in it, you can walk the Cotswold Way in nine or ten days, and the villages mean you are never far from a bed or a meal. At fifteen miles a day it is seven, and those days are full. The planner shows what any number of days looks like, and for each night it says where the count of beds came from and when it was read. A bed on a list is not a bed booked.

Build your walkCotswold Way in 9 days103 mi · about 11 miles a dayOpen the planner →