The Cotswolds is a never-ending exploration; a green and pleasant, golden-hewn idyll that goes on forever and never fails to delight. The West Oxfordshire/Chipping Norton parish of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has been my home for over a decade, but even after ten years of navigating its back roads and hedgerows I am still discovering new walkways, pubs, views, hotels, craftsmen, farm shops and many very old villages with names straight out of Middle Earth: Notgrove, Uckington, Oddington, Guilting Power, Lower Swell, Knockdown, Cockadilly, Twatley… Lower Slaughter.
The sheer size and scale of the Cotswolds often comes as a surprise to visitors hoping to experience the region in a single, cute, and walkable theme-park day; the wolds occupy a dragon’s head of rolling, Jurassic limestone hills rising from the meadows of the River Thames to an escapement above the Severn estuary, taking in a 90-miles-long chunk of countryside, stretching 25 miles wide and spanning around 800 square miles (that’s two-and-a-half times the size of NYC’s five boroughs, btw).
The Cotswolds isn’t just Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, either—Wiltshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire are also included in the county cluster that is home to over 3,000 miles of public footpaths, some 150 villages, 100 towns, at least 20 notable stately homes and historic estates, and—because this is England—around 290 pubs.
As a travel writer, journalist and YOLO contributor, the Cotswolds has long been a subject matter for my work—its proximity to London (especially the West Oxfordshire bit), its burgeoning and glamorous celebrity residents (David Beckham, Ellen DeGeneres, etc.), new hotels and enviable literary connections (Jane Austen, J.M,. Barrie, Nancy Mitford, J.R.R. Tolkien, and many more) have proved a source of fascination and aspiration for travellers from all over the world. Americans now call the Cotswolds “the Hamptons of England.”
Clapboarded Bicester Village, styled like a Hamptons beach house, is a good place to start your exploration; so wrap yourself up in N. Peal cashmere and a Burberry trench—there’s plenty of shopping, much to eat and drink, and some very grand, very large houses to look at.
Start off your day with breakfast at The Double Red Duke, Bicester Village’s very own pub, and you are already in a happy, Cotswolds state of mind—this barn-like inn being a re-imagination of the original Double Red Duke in Oxfordshire, an inn and hotel a few miles away in the village of Clanfield.
Since this is England, I’d recommend the kitchen’s fortifying “full English” of poached eggs, bacon, Cumberland sausage, tomato, black pudding, baked beans and mushrooms with toasted sourdough. How did the pub get its unusual name? The wisteria-clad coaching inn was once a 17th-century house owned by a kindly duke who grew acres of the “double red” corn variety on his land, allowing poor villagers to take what they needed. The locals honored this generosity by calling him the “Double Red Duke.”
Now, enough history… and more shopping .
The Cotswolds “look” is preppy/muddy—a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll; modern luxe and battered old Land Rovers, cashmere and Wellingtons—so for fashion, insulation and impermeability, I’m heading straight for Acne Studios, Brunello Cucinelli, Herno, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, The North Face, New Balance and N. Peal. As they say in this ‘shire, No such thing as bad weather… only unsuitable clothes.
I’ll order a flat white at Ralph’s Coffee truck while my girlfriend disappears into Holland Cooper—this is a Cotswolds-founded line of contemporary country wear designed by local girl Jade Holland Cooper, and you’ll see her sharply-tailored tweeds everywhere at Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire horse-racing meets, show-jumping events and country house parties.
An excursion to honey-stoned Oxford should be on your schedule—yes, it is overrun by tourists in the summer, but you’ll soon shake off the crowds in the world’s oldest university city by seeking out its more interesting and offbeat gems. On Oxford’s leafy outskirts, in the pretty village of Little Milton, is Albion Barn & Fields, a boutique but world-class art and sculpture park exhibiting works by Richard Long, Antony Caro, Erwin Wurm, David Adjaye and Richard Woods in a dreamy, bucolic setting.
In town, the Pitt Rivers Museum to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History is more the stuff of an Indiana Jones movie; founded in 1884, the Augustus Pitt-Rivers collection houses more than 500,000 objects gleaned from world anthropology, ethnography and archaeology. No strict historical agenda or curated timeline, no particular theme, just an overwhelming collective onslaught of weird, wild and fabulous stuff. Oxford boy Thom Yorke of Radiohead comes here to admire the African voice disguisers made by the Munshi of Nigeria.
The wonderful clutter continues down Oxford’s Market Street and at Objects of Use, a modern-day hardware store of gorgeously-tooled household utensils, all carefully chosen and conscientiously sourced from around the globe: garden kits from Japan, Atlas Mountains glassware, enamel pans from Austria, and a range of French solid stick “English Mount” umbrellas.
If the weather’s ugly, how about a matinee at the Cotswolds’ cutest cinema? “Brideshead Revisited,” “Harry Potter,” or “Another Country,” maybe? Open since 1910, the Ultimate Picture Palace has just one screen, only 121 seats, and serves homemade cake to its arthouse audiences. Its frontage is tiny but—rather hilariously—rendered in the grand neo-classical style.
More impressive architecture at the Sir John Soane-designed Aynho Park, a 17th-century house now converted to a grand showroom for the American furniture maker, Restoration Hardware. Even if you are not in the market for a new (and massive) sofa or console table, Aynho is a handsome delight—have a glass of wine in the Orangey restaurant, or something wood-fired at the open air Loggia pizzeria, stare out at heads of deer grazing on Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s landscaped back yard and find out exactly what a “ha-ha” is. (NB: a ha-ha is type of sunken fence constructed to give a garden the illusion of an unbroken, continuous rolling lawn, whilst providing boundaries for grazing livestock.)
Discovering Worton Kitchen Garden provides a similar adventure into the wild—it’s hidden away on light industrial land on the way from Oxford to the deep Cotswolds country, but once you locate its cottage building, farm shop, greenhouses, bakery and restaurant you’ll want to stay for a cold cider and a Muntjac chili con carne. Chef proprietor Simon specialises in muscular, Tuscany-inspired cuisine made with “hyper-local” produce—try the Worton Middlewhite pork scratchings with apple sauce or spicy Tuscan fennel sausages with coco beans. Best table is in the greenhouse—sit by the toasty wood-burning stove in the winter.
The Cotswolds is positively rude with massive country houses and spectacular gardens, many of them open to the public. Of course, Blenheim Palace at Woodstock (seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill) is irrefutably magnificent, but my favourites are the smaller, more eccentric properties.
Spend an afternoon in the fading, slightly ramshackle Jacobean environs of Chastleton House, Chasteton and experience the wonders of the indoor promenading hall, built for flirty afternoon strolls and exercises when the weather was poor outside. Kelmscott Manor is Arts and Crafts designer William Morris’s home, where visitors are invited to visit the outdoor loo where Morris himself sat in 1981, spied a thrush stealing some succulent red fruit growing in the garden, and was inspired to create his now world-famous Strawberry Thief print. You can also play croquet on Morris’s lawn.
Sezincote, about three miles from Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswold district of Gloucestershire, is positively zany; built in the Indian style in 1805, it is a country house and tearoom that can boast as the only authentically Mughal palace in northern Europe. More monastic is Burford Priory dating back to the 13th century, and an entertainment for royalty; King James I stayed for three nights in 1603, King Charles II dined there in 1681. (It’s also haunted by two ghosts and a poltergeist.)
Mathew Freud, the priory’s new owner, has extended his commitment to the pretty market town by converting an old 16th-century high street coach house into a boutique hotel and restaurant. Bull Burford’s Rorschach-style signage is nod to the Freud family’s pioneering work in psychoanalysis (Matthew Freud is great-grandson of Sigmund and nephew of Lucian), and the interior is immediately therapeutic—a hostelry with womb-like rooms and Saatchi-worthy artwork (including a Damien Hirst, Jean Michel Basquiat and, of course, a Lucien Freud).
Even in winter, guests can dine outside on the herb garden terrace enjoying the intimate alfresco event of a Guy Ritchie-designed copper and cast-iron Cashmere Caveman WildKitchen—this is live action, flame-adjacent BBQ theatre, and keen-eyed cineasts may recognise its man-cave fantasy fixtures from a cameo in Ritchie’s 2019 comedy crime caper, The Gentlemen. Bull guests can play padel at Freud’s own court in the neighbouring Priory grounds.
More shopping? Directly Opposite Bull Burford (no “the” here, btw, just “Bull”) is the extraordinary Oxford Brush Co. a little store selling… just brushes—40 different categories of brush in fact. Down the road at the Upton Smokery campus is Vigour and Skills, where you can browse artisanal ceramics and lust after hand crafted leather wear.
For plants and food and lovely leather work gloves, stop by at Burford Garden Centre (Jay Z and Beyoncé recently spotted in the Perennials aisle),·while a long spree in Daylesford Organic at Kingham is a Cotswolds absolute. Park your car next to the rows of Porsches, Teslas and Range Rovers and indulge yourself at the sprawling, village-sized shop that locals like to call “The Mother Ship.” My Daylesford recommendations? The jars of meatballs in tomato sauce, the stalwart Good Life bread, the yummy lemon drizzle cake and the Bamfords’ very own Provencal Leoube Rose. Daylesford also has a whole hamlet full of cottages, where guests can blanket themselves in the snuggly Bamford aesthetic and use the Daylesford Organic mothership as their village shop: Old School House and Wisteria Cottage are my picks.
All good Cotswolds days end with a drink and dinner at a village pub. And there are dozens—hundreds—of them. The Bell Inn at Langford is cute and cosy, while The Bull at Charlbury is always dark and delicious, with an open fire and some of the best food in the area. Stay overnight and have lunch the next day at The Bull team’s new venture, Canteen at the Old Coal Yard just outside Chipping Norton—pizza and pasta in a former fossil-fuel depository.
And, yes, pretty much every pub in the Cotswolds is called either the Bell or the Bull… or The Double Red Duke.
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