The Cotswolds famously encompasses some of the loveliest countryside in England. Loveliness belongs not only to the countryside but also to the buildings that go with it – viscerally pretty villages, farmsteads, manor houses and market towns.

An essential ingredient of the winning formula is the building stone, seemingly 80% honey and 20% lichen, extruded from the hills on which they stand and sculpted by generations of masons who honed their craft with instinctive simplicity. The vernacular is timeless and utterly beguiling, though it incorporates some of the grandest and proudest town houses in England. Some could almost have been designed by Andrea Palladio himself – and some almost were; the designs transmitted to Gloucestershire artisans through the innumerable copycat pattern books which buoyed up English provincial building for a couple of centuries.

Parish churches are a particular glory of the Cotswolds. Mostly mediaeval, they range from the diminutive, artless and additive – often blessedly under-restored and unmodernised – to the great churches in the larger villages and towns with soaring arcades, acres of glass, elaborately sculptured tombs and towers and spires to rival any in the country.

Where did the money come from? Wool. Prized as the best in Europe by the Merchant of Prato in the fourteenth century, wool and, later, cloth manufacturing was the basis for solid prosperity from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution – when the water power of the hills and valleys pushed the region to the forefront before the advent of steam power knocked it back again.

Thus the Cotswolds slumbered, ripe for discovery as a rural idyll by the bicycle-mounted aesthetes and romantics of the late Victorian era.

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