Blimey! I had gaped at Winston Churchill’s shorn curls inside a palace, loitered in Shakespeare’s birth room, and navigated bleating sheep while hiking through storybook villages in England’s Cotswolds. Feeling peckish one evening, in tiny rural apparently haunted Bretforton, I landed at the medieval Fleece Inn pub, where locals swigged Mad Goose beer and ominous white “witch circles” had long been painted on fireplace floors to keep out evil spirits by hypnotizing them.
Fresh off chime practice, two elderly church bell ringers tippled pints near a pair of circles and assured me that witches who scooted down the chimney got permanently stuck on the hearth. Pet dogs relaxed at their owners’ feet and when a Siberian husky excitedly shot up, I sensed he saw a poltergeist — or smelled the grilled lamb rump delivered to a human.
Quintessentially British — and quite quirky — the historic, picture-perfect Cotswolds region is dotted with numerous golden-hued limestone villages bestowed with giddy names such as Bourton-on-the-Water, Stratton-upon-Avon, Stow-on-the-Wold and Moreton-in-Marsh. Nearly every home displayed a quaint sign with its I.D. — the Blueberry Cottage, Watery Lane Cottage, Woodpecker Cottage, the Hit or Miss Cottage.
“The Cotswolds are what I call chocolate box and jigsaw puzzle country,” said Alvina Labsvirs, my Wilderness England trekking guide. True, this area is so palpably pretty its image graces containers of chewy nougats and 1,000-piece brainteasers.
However, I had my boots (and bandaged toe blisters) on the ground here. With four strangers-turned-travel mates I embarked on a weeklong Wilderness England walking adventure that roamed through the Cotswolds’ lush woodlands, private estates, cow pastures, wheat and barley fields, and ghostly archaic cemeteries. We also explored cultural hotspots, including the elaborate (sometimes fake bloodied) costume department at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the extraordinary Snowshill Manor jam-packed with an eccentric’s collection of gobsmacking stuff. After our final stop — a king morphed into stone by a witch in a meadow — I checked my pedometer. It indicated I hoofed 57.6 miles over the seven days.
Before we ever rambled along the Cotswold Way, Monarch Way, Wardens’ Way and Winchcombe Way, we hit UNESCO-listed, ostentatious Blenheim Palace, famous for being Churchill’s birthplace and ancestral residence of his relatives, the Dukes of Marlborough.Tourists gazed at the art-adorned bedroom where the esteemed statesman and British prime minister debuted six weeks premature in 1874. Churchill’s grandfather was the 7th duke and his parents were attending a ball at Blenheim when his mother unexpectedly began labor. Another exhibit featured Churchill’s framed light auburn curls clipped from his scalp at age 5.
Intrigued by scandal, I fixated on Consuelo Vanderbilt’s initialized bolero jacket, Faberge cigarette case and silver gilt fruit utensils; the American heiress was forced by her status-seeking mother into a miserable Gilded Age marriage with the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Understandably, he needed Consuelo’s multimillion dowry to afford upkeep of the palace’s lavish 187 rooms.
A short distance from Blenheim, in dinky Bladon village, Churchill is buried outside St. Martin’s Church in a humble grave together with his wife, Clementine, and near his parents. Someone had kindly left a mini bottle of Churchill’s preferred beverage — Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch — and his favorite stogie — Romeo y Julieta — next to his tombstone.
During previous years, I had a blast walking with Wilderness England’s sister companies, Wilderness Scotland and Wilderness Ireland. So I accurately figured this all-inclusive countryside jaunt (priced around $3,700 at wildernessengland.com) would be my cup of tea. More so because unlike the United States, the public has the right-of-way on private land in the Cotswolds and designated footpaths let me snoop at aristocratic domains.
In pocket-sized Stanway village, we chatted with an aging gent meticulously repairing the 500-year-old dry stone wall of the Earl of Wemyss’ sprawling estate before we marched past the earl’s venerable Stanway House. In Naunton, we paraded through an exclusive, vast pastoral farm where top hurdle-jumping racehorses are trained. (The prized ponies eyed us from their stables.) And on the equine theme, in Daylesford, we sauntered by a massive bronze sculpture of a horse’s head dominating acres of grassy property owned by a knighted billionaire.
On trails, we either climbed over stile fences, or individually opened “kissing gates” that allowed one person in at a time and prevented livestock from leaving. We strode over hill and dale, into serene beech and oak forests, and past hedgerows of forage-friendly blackberries, sloe berries, hazelnuts and hawthorn berries. Plump pigeons cooed, rare Gloucester cattle mooed, and colorful wildflowers bloomed, including abundant red cuckoo pints commonly called lords-and-ladies because the plants resemble sex organs.
Each morning, Alvina ferried us in our Mercedes minivan to another starting point and then we’d return later to our accommodations — for the initial three nights we roosted in Bibury at The Swan, a former coaching inn straddling a river dotted with white swans and mallard ducks. if you’ve ever seen the picture inside the cover of UK passports, that’s Bibury’s Arlington Row, a string of cottages erected in 1380, originally a wool store and eventually weavers’ homes. The wool business, baa-aaaa, is what brought wealth to the Cotswolds.
At The Swan, I slept in the comfy rodent-titled Vole Room, across from a drawing of its whiskered cousin, a long-tailed mouse. I swear at 4:43 a.m. the first morning, several lights — including the overhead chandelier lamp — suddenly brightly turned and stayed on. The receptionist later insisted that could only occur if someone in my room flipped switches. Then, I read the official hotel booklet; it stated during the late 18th and 19th centuries The Swan had been an important court where “the fate of local felons and villains were duly decided by magistrates.” Maybe a snitch (as in rat) came back.
Of course, murder sprung to mind the morning we left to hike in Upper and Lower Slaughter. “It has nothing to do with violence,” Alvina guaranteed. The lovely twin riverside villages obtained their homicidal names from the old English word “slothre” meaning “muddy place.” Traditional British red phone booths appeared throughout the Cotswolds; ironically in Upper Slaughter a repurposed kiosk held a life-saving defibrillator.
But let’s get back to birth rooms — specifically The Bard’s in Stratford-upon-Avon. “You are walking on the same stone floors that young William walked on,” an employee intoned as we toured the half-timbered, period-furnished house where preeminent playwright William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and lived as a child. Afterward, on Sheep Street, we refreshed in the Rose & Crown pub that dates to 1596 and features a large ceiling beam emblazoned, “To drink, or not to drink.” (Not that Hamlet thought about Shin Kickers pale ale when he contemplated “To be, or not to be.”)
Next, I fancied the bloody great tour in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s costume department involved in countless theater productions. There were a bazillion stage getups: battle armor, gold bejeweled crowns, a blood-drenched toga from “Julius Caesar,” clothes in sections such as “Broken down women’s trousers,” robes slit by swords, puffy-sleeved frocks, collared Elizabethan gowns, oversized animal heads worn by actors.
Another afternoon, our bucolic trek ended at Snowshill Manor, a treasure-bursting mansion showcasing the lifelong collection of Charles Paget Wade, an eccentric artist, architect and guy I would’ve loved to have known. (He used to dress in costumes and pop out of secret passageways to entertain guests.) Wade amassed more than 22,000 artifacts, including Japanese samurai armor, Chinese shrine cabinets, jingly brass bell anklets to scare off snakes, preserved porcupine fish, iron shackles, a witch doll formed around a wishbone, Victorian high bicycles and on and on and on. In one room’s busy corner, a wood-carved, 20-inch-tall Japanese mask maker wore only a loincloth and was so detailed you could see his veins.
“The way to approach this is not to look at every item in turn because you’d go mad,” a docent advised me. “Just look at each room or each angle. This is like making a still life painting but with things. Like I always said, it was Instagram-ready 100 years ago before Instagram.”
Elsewhere, we tromped up the iconic Broadway Tower, a four-story Saxon-style 18th-century castle built as a “folly” by an earl for his countess wife. The majestic hilltop tower, complete with turrets and gargoyles, wasn’t intended as a home but as a decorative beacon that the noble couple could admire from their mansion below. Mid-walk another time, we padded over ruins of the once-luxurious 1,900-year-old Chedworth Roman Villa, where parts of grand mosaic floors remain and my audio guide pointed out the communal toilet explaining instead of T.P. people re-washed sponges on sticks.
What I especially enjoyed, however, were the little surprises on our tranquil footpaths. Such as the medieval St. Oswald’s church and crumbling graveyard, eerily alone in a remote meadow, the rest of its village Widford possibly wiped out by the Black Plague. The Odd House cottage in sleepy Oddington made me smile; the ole residential Butchers House in Chipping Campden tidily filled its windows with cute ceramic pigs. In idyllic Adelstrop (population 129), the Adelstrop House — well-known because Jane Austen visited kin there — sold homemade honey on an outdoor stand and trusted payments would be put in a glass jar labeled “Honey-sty.”
On our final day, we peered at the mysterious Rollright Stones, a prehistoric complex of three limestone monuments in the middle of nowhere. The King’s Men is a 100-foot-wide ceremonial ring of dozens of irregular-shaped stones; the Whispering Knights consist of five stone monoliths that may be a burial chamber; and the King Stone is an 8-foot-tall boulder standing by itself. According to legend, the monarch, his army and conniving knights were invading the Cotswolds when a witch outsmarted them, fossilizing their bodies forever. Jolly good fun indeed.