Cotswold Way

The Cotswold Way is a walk along an edge. The Cotswolds are a tilted slab of limestone that rises gently from the Thames valley in the east and then stops, abruptly, in a scarp that faces west over the Severn towards Wales. The Way keeps to that scarp for a hundred miles. Nearly every day has the same shape to it: a climb onto the edge for the long view, a stretch along the top through beech wood and sheep-cropped grass, and a drop into a village of golden stone for the night. The climbs are short. There are a great many of them. Our line measures 165 kilometres from Chipping Campden to Bath and the terrain data puts the total ascent at about 3,600 metres, which is more than the South Downs Way in fewer miles, and it comes in pieces of a hundred metres at a time.

It starts at the Market Hall in Chipping Campden, a wool town whose high street has not needed to change much since the wool money stopped. The first climb comes within the first hour: Dover's Hill, a grassy amphitheatre on the lip of the scarp where the whole of the first day's view arrives at once, the Vale of Evesham flat and green below and the Malverns on the horizon. From here the Way settles into its rhythm along the top, through Fish Hill to Broadway Tower.

The Tower is the first landmark you will have heard of: a folly built on one of the highest points of the escarpment, 310 metres above sea level by our terrain, and visible from most of Worcestershire. The Way passes its door and then drops steeply into Broadway, the most photographed village in the Cotswolds and the first of the honey-coloured places you will walk through. Then Stanton and Stanway, two villages so complete they look arranged, joined by field paths under the edge.

Beyond Stanway the Way climbs back up to Beckbury Camp, an Iron Age enclosure on the scarp, and comes down past Hailes Abbey, a Cistercian house whose ruins sit in a quiet fold below the hill. From Hailes it is an easy few kilometres into Winchcombe, a small town with a long history — a royal centre of Saxon Mercia — and the first place on the walk with a proper choice of beds and cafés. Most people stop here on the first night. It is 29 kilometres from Chipping Campden, which is a long first day, and the reason so many walkers break the trail's northern end at Broadway or Stanton instead.

The climb out of Winchcombe is the steepest sustained pull of the northern half: two hundred metres from the river to the top of the scarp, most of it on a lane and then a field path, with the town shrinking behind you. At the top is Belas Knap, a Neolithic long barrow with a false entrance between two drystone horns, five thousand years old and in better condition than most of the barns you have walked past. It sits on the edge with a view back over Winchcombe and out to the Malverns, and there is no better place on the trail to eat a second breakfast.

The Way then works its way round the high ground of Cleeve Common. This is the roof of the Cotswolds. Cleeve Hill, where the trail passes the trig point, is about 316 metres above the sea by our terrain, the highest ground on the whole walk; the common's actual summit by the masts, a little off the route, is higher still. It is open grassland with the feel of a moor, grazed and golf-coursed and full of skylarks, and the view from the western rim, called Cleeve Cloud, is the widest of the trail: the Severn and the Forest of Dean, the Malverns, the Black Mountains in Wales on a clear day, and Cheltenham laid out immediately below like a model.

After Cleeve the edge turns south and the Way follows it above Cheltenham for the rest of the chapter, dipping to cross the A40 at Dowdeswell and climbing back through woods to the scarp at Seven Springs, one of the claimed sources of the Thames. Then Hartley Hill and Leckhampton Hill, which the town below has quarried for two centuries, leaving the pinnacle called the Devil's Chimney standing out from the face. Leckhampton is another two-hundred-and-ninety-metre viewpoint, and the last of the chapter.

This is a long stretch with no village on the trail itself. Cheltenham is always below you, and it is where most walkers on this section sleep, dropping off the edge at Cleeve, Dowdeswell or Leckhampton and coming back up in the morning. The planner knows the stops on the hill and the town beneath it; it does not yet know which is cheaper.

The middle of the Cotswold Way is where the scarp is at its most convoluted, folded into a series of promontories that each push out westward over the Vale and each carry something old on the top. The Way visits them one after another, and this short chapter — twenty-one kilometres — has more ups and downs in it than its length suggests.

Crickley Hill comes first, a country park now, with an Iron Age hillfort on the tip of the spur and, beneath it, evidence of settlement going back to the Neolithic; the ramparts are still obvious and the view from the point takes in the whole of the Severn plain. From Crickley the Way runs along the rim past Barrow Wake, where a stone tells the geological story of the edge you are standing on, to Birdlip, where the old Roman road from Cirencester to Gloucester comes over the hill. It is a good place to be aware of the traffic: the trail crosses the A417 here and at Crickley, both busy.

Then the woods close in. The stretch from Birdlip round to Painswick is almost all beech, the Cotswold Commons and Beechwoods, hanging on the steep face of the scarp, and the Way threads through them on tracks that are shaded in summer and heavy after rain. Cooper's Hill is in the middle of it, the grassy slope where a cheese is chased down a gradient every spring by people who ought to know better; the Way crosses the top of that slope, and it is steep enough from above that you understand the ambulances.

The last promontory of the day is Painswick Beacon, another hillfort with a golf course on it, and a broad view south down the line of the edge towards the next few days. From the Beacon the Way drops past the quarries into Painswick, a small town of grey rather than golden stone, with a churchyard of clipped yews that the town counts — the story is that there are ninety-nine and a hundredth will not grow. It is a natural halt: beds, a shop, a pub, and the whole of the southern half of the walk still to come.

South of Painswick the scarp swings out west in a great bulge above the Severn, and for a morning the Way rides the rim of it. Haresfield Beacon is the point of the bulge: a hillfort on a spur with the river close enough below to see the ships, the Forest of Dean beyond it and, on the right day, the Welsh hills behind that. A topograph a little further on names everything you can see. This is the view the trail's western edge has been promising since Dover's Hill, and it is worth the detour to the very tip.

The edge then turns back east into the valley of the Frome at Stroud, and the Way has to get across it. It comes down through Randwick's woods, crosses the river and the canal at Ryeford, and passes through King's Stanley, the lowest point of the trail before Bath at under fifty metres. Stroud itself is off to the left, a wool-and-cloth town in a steep valley, and the biggest place near the trail between Cheltenham and Bath: a station on the line from Gloucester to Swindon, and a way in or out for anyone walking the Way in sections.

The climb out of the Stroud valley is the day's real work, up through the woods onto Selsley Common and then along the edge to Coaley Peak, where the trail passes Nympsfield long barrow — chambered, Neolithic, with its roof gone so you can see the plan of it — and a picnic site with the same wide western view. A kilometre on is another barrow, Uley, called Hetty Pegler's Tump after a seventeenth-century landowner, and still roofed.

From Coaley Peak the Way follows the edge above Uley to the double summit of Cam Long Down and its smaller neighbour, two steep grassy hills that stand out from the scarp like a pair of upturned boats, and drops from them into Dursley. Dursley is a working town rather than a picture, and the more useful for it; it sits in a bowl of hills with the Way passing straight through the middle of it, and it is where the planner will most often put you at the end of this stretch.

Dursley to the Somerset Monument is the stretch where the Cotswold Way earns its reputation for climbing. It leaves the town straight up Stinchcombe Hill, a flat-topped spur with a golf course on it and a walk right round its rim to Drakestone Point that the official route takes in full — a loop of three kilometres for a view you have half seen already, which is why there is a well-worn short cut across the neck. Take the loop if the day is clear. The Severn is very close here, the bridges are in sight, and it is the last time the river is this near.

Down again, through North Nibley, and immediately up again to the Tyndale Monument, a tower on Nibley Knoll built in 1866 for William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English and was burned for it, and who may or may not have been born nearby. It is thirty-odd metres high, it can be climbed when it is open, and the view is the reward for the second climb of the morning. Along the edge from the monument is Brackenbury Ditches, a hillfort hidden in the trees, and then the drop into Wotton-under-Edge, a small wool town under the scarp with the friendliest high street on the walk.

The character changes after Wotton. The scarp loses its sharpness and the Way runs through a more enclosed country of valleys and woods and parkland: down the Tyley valley, up past Blackquarries Hill, along the lanes through Wortley and Alderley, two hamlets of big stone houses, and then a long, level, quiet stretch southward with the edge somewhere off to the right and the walking easy for the first time in days.

It ends at the Somerset Monument, a tall column at Hawkesbury Upton put up in 1846 for a general of that family, standing in a field at the head of the village where the Way turns for Bath. Hawkesbury Upton is the village; beds are thin along this whole stretch, and this is one of the places the planner will flag.

South of Hawkesbury the Cotswolds are running out. The scarp is still there — the Way keeps to its edge for another day — but it is lower and gentler, the villages come closer together, and the sound of the M4 arrives long before the motorway does. This is the easiest walking of the trail and some of the least visited, and there is a pleasure in the quiet of it after the beacons.

The Way comes down off the edge into Horton and then along the foot of it to the finest hillfort on the whole walk, Sodbury Camp above Old Sodbury: a rectangular Iron Age enclosure with double ramparts still tall enough to hide a walker, and grass on top where a fort of the Roman period followed. The trail crosses straight through it. Little Sodbury below has the church where William Tyndale was chaplain in the 1520s, closing the story that the monument at Nibley opened a day earlier; Old Sodbury has the beds.

Then Tormarton, a stone village within earshot of junction 18, and the crossing of the M4 itself on a bridge, which is more interesting than it sounds because the Way goes from one country to another in that hundred metres: from the Cotswolds proper into the parkland and estates of the Avon. The trail keeps to field paths and the old parish boundaries, past the site of the Battle of Dyrham of 577, where the West Saxons broke the British kingdoms of the lower Severn, and down to Dyrham itself.

Dyrham is a National Trust house in a deer park under the edge, William-and-Mary and built for a diplomat, and the Way passes along the park wall rather than through it. The village beside it is small. Beds are thin between Old Sodbury and Bath, and the planner will often carry you on from here.

The last day of the Cotswold Way climbs back onto the edge one more time, and stays up. From Dyrham the trail goes through Pennsylvania and Cold Ashton — a village whose name tells you what the wind does up here — and out onto Lansdown, the long plateau that stands over Bath from the north. In 1643 a Civil War battle was fought along the top of it; the monument to Sir Bevil Grenville, the Royalist commander who was killed here, stands beside the trail, and the earthworks of a hillfort older than either army are just beyond it.

Lansdown is racecourse and golf course and grass, and the Way follows its western rim past Hanging Hill to Prospect Stile, where Bath appears for the first time: the whole city in its bowl of hills, the Abbey tower in the middle of it, the crescents in their curves. It is the finest first sight of a finish on any English trail and it is worth timing the day so that you arrive here with the afternoon light behind you.

The descent is gradual, round the shoulder of Kelston Round Hill and down through Weston, which is a suburb now but keeps its village high street, and then through the western edge of the city: Royal Victoria Park, the Royal Crescent above it, the Circus, Queen Square, and the last few hundred metres through the streets to the Abbey. The trail finishes at a stone plaque set into the pavement in front of the west door — the same kind of marker as the one at Chipping Campden, so that the two ends of the walk rhyme.

Bath has more beds than the rest of the Way put together, a main-line station ten minutes' walk from the Abbey, and a Roman bath which is the right way to end a hundred miles on foot.