The Cotswolds occupies a particular place in the English imagination. Its honey-coloured limestone villages, its ancient church towers rising above beech-wooded valleys, its markets and manor houses and quiet lanes bordered by dry-stone walls — all of it conspires to produce a version of England that feels simultaneously timeless and intensely reassuring.
It is also, understandably, extremely popular. Bourton-on-the-Water on a summer weekend; Burford in July; Chipping Campden during the Cotswold Olympics — these experiences can feel closer to a theme park than a rural idyll. The crowds do not diminish the underlying beauty of the place, but they do transform the experience of it.
The answer is timing and selection. Visit in September or October, when the summer visitors have retreated and the beech woods are doing extraordinary things with light. Choose the less-celebrated villages alongside the famous ones. Walk between them rather than driving. The Cotswolds that reveals itself under these conditions is magnificent.
Lacock, Wiltshire
Lacock sits technically at the Cotswolds' southern edge, in Wiltshire rather than Gloucestershire, but its National Trust-preserved centre is one of the finest examples of a medieval village in England. It has been used as a filming location so frequently — Pride and Prejudice, Downton Abbey, Wolf Hall — that parts of it are immediately recognisable to anyone who watches British period drama. But away from the abbey and the main street, it is a place of remarkable quietness.