Last Tuesday, Kyle and I returned from a three-day hiking trip on the Cotswold Way, a 100-mile path that follows the Cotswold escarpment in Gloucestershire. We had both been itching to see some quintessential English countryside, and we couldn’t have picked a better path to walk! We chose this hike because of its proximity to Oxford, but we were pleasantly surprised to hear that the area is also considered to contain some of the most beautiful scenery in England.

The Cotswold escarpment is famous for its yellow limestone, and thus every village we walked through was filled with wonderfully picturesque limestone cottages (many with thatched roofs). We officially started our walk at the north end of the trail, in a town called Chipping Campden, although we actually had to walk the six miles before that from Moreton-in-Marsh, there being no bus service on Sundays.

In Chipping Campden, we visited St James Church and later had tea downtown. The highlight, though, was the medieval covered market still standing in the middle of High St. We then left town and walked to Broadway, so named for its wide main street. On the descent into Broadway, we passed Broadway Tower, built on a nearby hilltop that offered spectacular views of the surrounding counryside.

The second day, we hiked from Broadway to Winchcombe, the longest stretch of our journey. The walk was punctuated with the occasional spectacular hilltop vista, and one highlight was certainly passing through the field marked by a “Danger: Bull in field” sign, and subsequently taking pains to keep our distance. The actual highlight was visiting Hailes Abbey, a ruined 13th-century Cistercian monastery, my first visit to an English monastery. We spent several hours exploring the ruins, accompanied by helpful audio guides that explained the function of each room and made it easy to visualize what the medieval buildings would have looked like.

We spent the night at a quaint B&B adjacent to railroad tracks still used by steam engine enthusiasts. On the third morning, we explored Winchcombe and spent an hour looking around the parish church, St Peter’s, accompanied by a helpful local volunteer. At the end of the day, we took two buses and a train back to Oxford, which seemed a bustling metropolis compared to the weekend’s hours of solitude and quiet main streets of the Cotwold towns we visited.

The major discovery of the weekend was that Brits love long-distance walking, and that there exists a wonderful infrastructure to support it. Besides the well-marked “Cotswold Way” signs, we encountered, at virtually every gate we passed through, other arrows indicating the existence of public footpaths. On other trips around Oxford and elsewhere, we’ve since noticed these signs by the edges of roads and fields. Adrian says that these paths are often centuries-old rights-of-way that, today, pass through farmers’ fields, across highways, and through the middles of towns. On our walk, these paths meant that we spent a lot of time in the close company of sheep, cows and horses, as well as their droppings. Nevertheless, it was the rustic experience we were hoping it would be, and even though though we only completed a quarter of the Cotswold Way, we aim to finish it (in segments) over the next month or two.