Cotswolds 2

We were supposed to be en famille for this part of our trip: just us, together again for the first time for a while, a quiet time in the countryside to catch up. But, while celebrating the end of the Cambridge year in the early morning of the day we were due to meet up, Hannah dislocated her knee and ended up in bed in Cambridge with her leg in a brace instead of being reunited with her family and discovering the beauties of the Cotswold countryside.

I picked up Lydia and Tony, along with a rental car, from Heathrow Airport on Saturday afternoon and we drove north to Broad Campden, a tiny hamlet in the northern part of the Cotswolds. Our cottage was compact and cute, adorned with roses and thatch, with pretty curtains and eiderdowns, leadlight windows and birds feeding outside the kitchen.

Despite the cool and cloudy weather, and Tony and Lydia falling asleep at nine every night, we managed, to do quite a lot: the lovely Bourton-on-the-Water with its quaint model village (much smaller than I remembered it from when I was five years old!) and pretty stream running under five bridges; brisk walks across gently rolling hills with our cousins and their dogs; long and delicious lunches in country pubs; a lovely old Norman church and now-ruined manor house; a gourmet visit to Daylesford Organic Café and Shop with its amazing walk-in cheese shop  (yes, there is good, very good, food in England!); the Rollright Stones, which are thought to be around 5,000 years old; and a look at Warwick Castle, Lydia’s first (that she can remember) proper castle, which, although very touristy, is still an interesting place to wander and wonder with its towering ramparts and authentic waxwork figures.

Finally the compulsory drive through the Sibford villages and the Bloxham areas, to see my grandfather’s house, Long Barn, that I loved so much, and the small house, Windrush, where I spent my early childhood, little changed in fifty years, the cypress trees that my parents planted and that I used to burrow under during games of hide-and-seek still standing across the front garden. Even today, the smell of cypress takes me back there.