Cotswold Way

The Cotswold Way is a relatively recent National Trail, having achieved this status in 2007. In a sense the name is a misnomer because there's a lot of the Cotswolds that the trail does not include; it essentially follows the limestone escarpment on the western edge of the Cotswolds, from Chipping Campden to Bath. The route also goes further south than the part of the Cotswolds that tourists troop to; between Stroud and Bath we we walking through countryside that we didn't know at all, but what a wonderful discovery. We'll be back!

The limestone here is oolitic limestone, resulting in a quintessentially English landscape of rolling hills and pretty villages and towns built of the same stuff; in this context the stone is known as "Cotswold stone" and it gives a delightfully mellow golden appearance to the buildings.

The Cotswold Way is 102 miles long and although in overview it appears to run fairly steadily to the south and slightly to the west, when you look at the detail it wiggles a lot. There are also quite a lot of ascents and descents - none excessive, but you shouldn't underestimate the Cotswolds.

Occasionally the path descends from the escarpment, then climbs up and over an outlier, "just because it's there". Perhaps the most notable example of this is the climb up Cam Long Down near Dursley, but this section of walking was perhaps the best of the whole trail, and I wouldn't have wanted to miss it out (although there is a perfectly decent path around the edge). Most of the trail is in Gloucestershire, but it passes through Worcestershire briefly in the Broadway area and ends in Avon.

I'm never quite sure whether it is best to buy a guidebook or just to use the Ordnance Survey maps (Explorer Sheets OL45, 179, 168, 167 and 155 cover the walk), but on this occasion part of the route (in the Winchcombe area) had altered since our OL45 map ("The Cotswolds") was printed in 2005, so the official Aurum Press guide was useful if only for the up to date maps. Having said that, on some later sections the OS map was more up to date than the guidebook, and the signposting on the ground occasionally gave a route that was slightly different to that shown anywhere. However we like to see the route in its broad context (which the maps are best for) and to learn more about it (hence the guidebook); the signposting was generally good, but the guidebook was useful for giving directions through towns. So I'm pleased we had everything.

We started our walk along the Cotswold Way on a long weekend in January 2016 and after three shortish and muddy days of walking we had progressed from Chipping Campden to Winchcombe. We returned to the area over Easter 2016; Easter was early and the weather forecast for the weekend had been pretty dreadful, but it was nothing like as bad as we'd expected and we progressed to Ryeford near Stroud. We completed the walk in more conventional JordanWalks style in April 2016, catching the train to Stonehouse near Stroud then staying in B&Bs and pubs en route to Bath. After reaching the end of the Cotswold Way we walked along the Kennet and Avon Canal to Devizes, thus linking up with the Wessex Ridgeway, which we walked a few years ago. The weather forecast for our walk in April was also fairly grim; in reality it was cold and we had occasional hail showers, but it was mostly dry and sunny and the mud was starting to dry out!

The seasons seem a bit confused this year (March was mild but April was cold) and we encountered all sorts of spring wildflowers in flower, not necessarily at the time of year we'd expected them - aconites, daffodils, primroses, bluebells, cowslips. We also saw wildlife, including herons and deer, as well as domesticated cattle and sheep with their attractive spring-time young. We met other walkers, in particular on warmer weekend days and over Easter, and some of them appeared to be serious walkers, presumably walking the whole Cotswold Way, but the path didn't feel too busy. A couple of the B&Bs we tried to book claimed to be full; I wouldn't want to accuse them of lying, but we had all of the B&Bs we ended up in completely to ourselves! On one occasion, this was probably because we were some distance from the path, in Marshfield not Cold Ashton; however, as we have found previously, the extra walk took us through glorious countryside and to a first class B&B in a delightful village which we would otherwise not have known about.

Click here for more of our photographs of the Cotswold Way.

First leg