The Cotswolds is a range of hills in central England, sometimes called the "Heart of England", a 25-by-90 mile area designated as the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  The spine of the Cotswolds runs southwest to northeast through six counties including Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The county of Gloucestershire forms the largest area of the Cotswolds. The Youth Hostel in Stow-on-the Wold town centre on Market Square, roughly speaking, north of Oxford. The Georgian-style hostel building is a Grade II listed 17th Century town house.

The "Saturday Club" - setting out from Stow Youth Hostel in the town centre.

It was a sizeable group that made it to the Youth Hostel in Stow-on-the Wold:

We set out after breakfast Saturday morning from the Youth Hostel in Stow-on-the Wold. Zoltan was unfortunately not feeling well and decided to stay behind, which was a shame, given that he had flown all the way from Budapest for the weekend. Heading south-east out of town, crossing Park Street, the route took us down a country lane towards Maugersbury, where we passed Maugersbury Manor, a family run B&B. We swung right towards the A429. A short distance down the A429, we then took another country lane that led directly passed a farm, where we picked up a track towards Lower Slaughter. Lower Slaughter is built on both banks of the River Eye. At the west end of the village there is an old water mill with an undershot waterwheel and a chimney for additional steam power.  From here we proceeded to Upper Slaughter, arguably not as picturesque as its counterpart, through which the same river flows.

Upper Slaughter was identified by author Arthur Mee as one of the 32 Thankful Villages, although more recent work by Norman Thorpe, Tom Morgan and Rod Morris has revealed a total of 50. Meaning the small number of villages in England and Wales which lost no men in World War I, the term Thankful Village was popularised by Arthur Mee in the 1930s. In Enchanted Land (1936), the introductory volume to "The King’s England" series of guides, he wrote "that a Thankful Village was one which had lost no men in the Great War because all those who left to serve came home again." 

The name of Slaughter has no connection with blood but is derived from the old English word Slohtre meaning a muddy place, which it may once have been but not anymore. We passed the largest business in the village, the Lord of the Manor Hotel, a 17th Century former Rectory of honey-coloured stone building. Sometime soon after that we stopped for a break next to the River Eye. Heading northwest out of Upper Slaughter, we entered a forest of trees before reaching and crossing the A4068. Turning north again along a path, we crossed open farmland alongside a low stone wall, until we reached a steel gate, our attention attracted to a number of horses grazing in the field, who approached us thinking that we might be the source of food. beautiful splendid horses they were. Just then a pair of horse riders approached the gate, through which they gratefully passed after we had opened it for them. This is the beauty of being able to ramble the English countryside, bridleways grant hikers access to roam designated paths across established farmland at their leisure. Its a system that works, given the people are essentially crossing private land, in many cases that which is not even fenced off. The English have a long tradition of rambling and therefore respect this.  In all the years that I've been with our hiking club, I've never encountered any animosity from landowners.

Perhaps one of the more popular villages in the Cotswolds is that of Bibury. A feature of the village are the oft-photographed medieval almshouses of Arlington Row. Bibury is a village and civil parish on the river Coln about 6.5 miles (10.5 km) northeast of Cirencester. The artist and craftsman William Morris called Bibury "the most beautiful village in England" when he visited it. Its honey-coloured 17th-century stone cottages with steeply pitched roofs once housed weavers who supplied cloth for fulling (a process of eliminating dirt and oils in cloth making, especially wool) at nearby Arlington Mill. The mill now houses a folk and agricultural museum, containing a room dedicated to Morris. The River Coln flows alongside the main street. Its water supplies the trout farm, where some 10 million rainbow trout are spawned yearly. The Cotswolds is characterised by attractive small towns and villages built of the underlying Cotswold stone, a yellow oolitic limestone. An oolite is a sedimentary rock formed from ooids, spherical grains composed of concentric layers which have cemented together. The name derives from the Greek word òoion meaning egg.

[1 - The Cycle]

[2 - The Walk]

[3 - The Walk (cont.)]

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Links to other websites:

• Cotswolds - official website

• The Slaughters - places to go

• Guided Cotswolds tours - a website

• Bibury - website

• Lord of the Manor Hotel - website

• Stow on the Wold Youth Hostel, The Square - yha website

• Visit Cotswolds - website