Stately pursuits in the Cotswolds

DESPITE the armada of buses that sail into its villages, disgorging tourists keen to find Shangri-La in this green corner of England, the Cotswolds have a charm.

Summer getaways ... children paddle in the River Windrush at Bourton-on-the-Water. Picture: Jenny Stevens

IT was too hot for polo. Mad dogs and Englishmen may go out in the midday sun, but not expensive horseflesh.

At Cirencester Polo Club, where the Prince of Wales and the young princes play, chukkas were cancelled in the heat of the day as the UK sweltered through its hottest summer on record.

In the Cotswolds, two hours by car west of London, children joined the ducks paddling in the River Windrush flowing through the pretty village of Bourton-on-the-Water, and shop signage invited customers to "come in and walk around our air-conditioned shop".

Cool Britannia was in a sweat, but nothing stops a tourist invasion.

Every day an armada of buses and cars sails into the Cotswold villages, disgorging garden enthusiasts, birdwatchers, photographers, lovers of antiques, foodies, trampers and star-spotters, eager to find their own Shangri-La in this 160km by 80km verdant corner of England.

For such a small area, the Cotswolds has a disproportionate number of attractions: postcard villages like Stow-on-the-Wold, Upper and Lower Slaughter and Tetbury; ancient cities like Gloucester and elegant Regency towns such as Cheltenham; impressive castles including Sudeley and Berkeley; and gardens galore, including some of England's finest.

Celebrities – Liz Hurley, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Clarkson – have snapped up manor houses or built stately piles to rival royal neighbours: Prince Charles' Highgrove estate and The Princess Royal's Gatcombe Park near Tetbury being the cream of the crop.

Yet for all its wealth and celebrity residents, traffic jams and Ye Olde Everything antique shops, the Cotswolds have a unique charm.

Where else can you find polo sticks for sale in the opportunity shops, as you can in Tetbury? Or plaques with the blue Prince of Wales feathers in the window of a blink-and-you'll-miss it cheese shop (Tetbury again) announcing their services are By Appointment to HRH The Prince of Wales?

Or a sign heralding the Bledisloe Cup Competition (Lower Slaughter) and find it's not the rough and tumble of rugby but for the Best Kept Village comp?

Throughout Cotswold villages, mellowed stone buildings lean precariously into the laneways, their rickety roofs and uneven floors announcing their ancestry; overflowing flower baskets hang at every door, and horses clip-clop through the traffic to add to the picture.

The countryside completes the sensory overload: every hill affords a peaceful view of checkerboard fields flecked with the gold of hay bundles; every valley has a stream meandering on the way to nowhere fast.

Away from the bottlenecks, it's pure poetry.

Gatcombe Park-based Australian equestrian Andrew Hoy summed it up best when he said it was "so quiet you can concentrate on birdsong".

Or concentrate on eating.

Plenty come to the Cotswolds to do just that, discovering berries with intense flavours and colours supermarket shoppers can only dream about; vegetables that snap and crunch with freshness; beef that melts in the mouth: cheese with wonderful monikers such as white nancy; apple cider that is fine enough to serve the Queen, and white wine that was a revelation, to say the least.

Chef Robert Rees, who trained with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and is a leader in the healthy school food campaign, is a tireless campaigner for Cotswold produce. Known as The Cotswold Chef, he has coerced many a pub and restaurant to buy and serve local.

It's working, too. At gastro-pubs like the Priory Inn at Tetbury, the menu lists the produce in food miles (FM), showing how far each item travels before reaching your plate.

The Duchy Home Farm, for instance, is five minutes away, so Prince Charles' rump, taters and carrots were FM-0.3 ... and that's fresh!

But it's not only contented beef fed on dandelions, wild weeds and native grass rich in omegas 3s and vitamin E (Stokes Marsh Farm, FM-35), or the Holy Smoked Gloucester cheese smoked over real oak chippings (FM-13), that's attracting the crowds.

The marriage of old with new continues with the tasteful refurbishment of old farmhouses like Calcot Manor into a boutique hotel complete with restaurants and spa, or the rebirth of a once grand manor, Bibury Court, into a hotel with an exciting young chef.

Even old cars have a new lease of life. Dream Wheels can put you behind the wheel of a classic or sports car so you can tour the Cotswolds in style.

We motored down country lanes in an elegant 1987 Mercedes-Benz SL convertible, but you could also appease the inner revhead in a fire-engine red 1966 E-type Jaguar or throbbing '86 Ferrari 308.

It's not cheap by any means, and you may get hopelessly lost in the country lanes, but at least you see the Cotswolds without the crowds.

Or take the path of least resistance and let someone else do the driving. Book an escorted tour in Australia, join a coach tour from London or check out Back Roads Touring Company, which specialise in small group and customised touring. Or use shanks's pony.

At Bibury Court, we stepped through the garden gate, wandered through an ancient churchyard and followed the trout-filled River Coln's course until we came to Arlington Row – former weavers' cottages that are among England's photographic icons.

At the end of the row are three privately owned, free-standing cottages, where an owner was happy to stop trimming his hedge and talk about the cost of upkeep, bemoaning the £1000 a metre it costs to replace the stone roofs alone.

The lessees of the cottages, he said, were people "on the way up or on the way out". And in one breath, we got the picture. Real estate values, it seems, are a universal language.

The writer was a guest of Singapore Airlines and VisitBritain.

The Sunday Telegraph