The Cotswolds

: The Grand Account :

The Cotswolds are England's quietest statement of wealth: limestone villages the colour of warm honey, wool churches built on medieval fortunes, sheep-cropped hills folding into one another without drama. Nothing here is new, and that is precisely the point. The discreet rich have settled these valleys for centuries, and the modern elite follow, drawn by farmhouses behind long drives, by Daylesford's pastures, by the understanding that true luxury is the absence of urgency. The villages, Burford, Bibury, Stow-on-the-Wold, keep their counsel. One comes to the Cotswolds not to be seen but to disappear, beautifully, for a day.

Leave London on the M40, departing at Junction 8 for the A40, Oxford slipping past to the south, until Burford announces the Cotswolds proper with its steep medieval high street, roughly an hour and three quarters from Mayfair. The Range Rover LWB is the natural choice here: composed on the motorway, sure-footed on the single-track lanes between drystone walls. Your chauffeur will have studied the route in advance, knows which lanes narrow and where to pause for the view above the Windrush valley, and keeps the boot ready for whatever Daylesford's farm shop persuades you to carry home.

Begin at Daylesford near Kingham: the farm shop opens at nine, and the morning is the time for it. Drive on to Bibury for Arlington Row, the weavers' cottages William Morris called the most beautiful in England; arrive before eleven or after four. Luncheon at The Wild Rabbit in Kingham, or, with notice, at Thyme in Southrop, a village within a village. The afternoon belongs to Stow-on-the-Wold's antique dealers or the gardens at Hidcote. October is the connoisseur's month, when the beech turns and the coaches thin. As dusk gathers over the wolds, the car is warm and London feels usefully far away.