A typically picturesque Cotswolds street scene. Photo / Patricia Greig
A 17th-century homestead is a sumptuous base for an exploration of the area's villages and hills, finds Patricia Greig
It was a bleak and blustery day in Gaydon. Old plastic bags scrunched together on top of bare, spindly trees lining fields defrosting in a weak spring sun. It was a quintessential English day and I almost expected Beatrix Potter characters to be waking up from hibernation across the farmlands. The atmosphere had been in a Ziplock bag, frozen as it has always been in the Northern winters since before mythological tales were told.
And then came a disturbance. It was me, blasting through on my noble steed, an Aston Martin Vanquish under the watchful eye of a rather dashing racing car driver called Joe.
I wanted to go fast, and fast I went, along narrow country lanes lined with ancient stone walls. I roared around corners, through small villages where elderly men tipped their hats (or tried not to lose them) at the car. I rudely hit the throttle in response, making the glass in their cottage windows quiver with fear.
As the sun set on the newly disturbed surroundings, I arrived at Barnsley House, which quickly became my very own countryside retreat.
Built in 1697, Barnsley was once home to Rosemary Verey, an internationally acclaimed garden designer. Verey designed gardens for some rather important clients, such as HRH Prince of Wales, but her most famous were her gardens at home.
The secluded homestead is surrounded by picturesque gardens Verey laid out during the late 1950s. They spread over a 4.5ha site with 1.6ha of formal gardens (featuring a knot garden, lawns, potager, terraces and secluded paths), a substantial kitchen garden the hotel kitchen uses, meadows and a sizeable paddock.
What better time to visit than the beginning of spring and witness the plants, now lovingly tended by Richard Gatenby, begin to uncurl in the sun's rays.
There are 18 rooms at Barnsley House, built in 1697. Each room features modern amenities, luxury bathrooms and deliciously comfortable furniture. The house is comfortably elegant, enough to make guests feel right at home with its creamy interior tones and garden views.
The hotel was renovated in 2010 to achieve a greater synergy between the house and gardens, and it has been a success, adding to the holistic and romantic appeal of the premises.
Venturing into the Cotswolds — an area roughly 40km by 145km — can be rather daunting and a comfortable place to call home is absolutely necessary, especially when the place has an excellent kitchen and serves large portions of Scottish smoked salmon for breakfast.
Barnsley House also offers a beautiful day spa, a bar complete with local gins, a 30-seat cinema and two brilliant restaurants: The Potager Restaurant and Bar and The Village Pub.
To enjoy a hearty taste of the Cotswolds, a special part of England best known for its quaint villages and limestone buildings with tiny windows and doors, Becky, from Secret Cottage tours, is your best bet.
Becky lives in a secret cottage with a roof thatched using Norfolk reed. Becky's cottage is, in fact, three cottages joined together, because people these days tend to need a bit more room than they did 500 years ago when these places were built.
The walls are hand-painted with ornate designs, the ceilings are low and three inglenook open log fireplaces turn entire rooms into hearths.
Becky likes to feed people before taking them off the beaten track, and I found myself perched by the fireside, watched by two particularly scornful giraffe statues made for a maharaja around the year 1900. They sneered as I was fed scones and cream, teas, cornish pastries, sandwiches and pork pies until I feared I was about to explode all over the furniture.
Thankfully, Becky managed to stuff me into her Mercedes minivan and we were on our way.
The tour continues over six hours, covering an area between Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire in North Cotswold.
Over the course of the tour, guests see a fine selection of limestone cottages, National Trust houses, landscapes and villages unique to the area. These are the old, stoic bones of England built to stand the test of time, down somewhat forgotten lanes, surrounded by rows of freshly cut primrose hedges.
Having lived in the area for 25 years, Becky knows her stuff and can fill you in on anything from house prices to hardly spoken-about fox hunts (which still continue on Wednesdays in season, when 100 riders and horses meet at a nearby dovecot with their dogs). Becky knows the ins and out of the countryside and the stories behind many of the villages and even individual houses.
One especially beautiful home is Chastleton House, which was lived in for many years by an elderly woman and her 20 cats until she died. She gifted the property to the National Trust, which cares for the property and opens it to visitors.
Each tour depends on the season, and Becky makes sure her guests have a day filled with pleasant surprises.
Having spent the best part of a day in a mystical world of cottages I felt like Matilda visiting Miss Honey, which was the highlight until I visited The Slaughters. Lower Slaughter has been inhabited for more than 1000 years.
I admit my inner Addams Family-member perked up upon hearing the name, hoping for explicit cottage gore, but the word slaughter is a Saxon word for marsh, and the towns are the opposite of gothic.
Soon after I arrived it began to snow — my first experience of it. Tiny pieces of ice fell on what looked like Toy Town, as homes twisted next to each other, their roofs made from warped stone slats held up by mismatched bricks in uneven walls.
Worth a stop in Lower Slaughter is the Old Mill, a humming establishment which now houses a museum, a charming store with local gifts, crafts and souvenirs (and duck food), as well as an icecream parlour and a tea room. A mill has stood on this site since 1086.
Although there may be many mismatched bricks in the walls of Britain's history, each brick tells a story and the story of the Cotswolds is certainly charming and riddled with a mysterious air whistling through ancient hills and around bends.
The country air is a mere suggestion of history's powerful existence in this place. It's a history that is perhaps not as fast I was in my Aston Martin, but certainly powerful.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Air New Zealand flies from Auckland to London via LA. For a day trip to the Cotswolds, take the A22 train from London's Paddington to Moreton-in-Marsh station. The trip takes an hour and 40 minutes.
Further information: See cotswoldtourismtours.co.uk for more on Becky's Secret Cottage tours.
The writer travelled courtesy of VisitBritain.
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