#cotsworld

Here's a photo recap of our recent day trip to the Cotswolds to visit two of their many villages, Bibury and Chipping Campden, respectively.

Bibury is a village and civil parish in Gloucestershire, England, and is about a 2 hours drive away from London. It is on both banks of the River Coln which rises in the Cotswolds and is a Thames tributary. The village is centred 6.5 miles (10.5 km) northeast of Cirencester.

Bibury was described by the 19th Century artist and craftsman William Morris as "the most beautiful village in England" when he visited it.

The village is known for its honey-coloured seventeenth century stone cottages with steeply pitched roofs, which once housed weavers who supplied cloth for fulling at nearby Arlington Mill. 

Our main reason to visit Bibury village was to see Arlington row in all its splendour.

The picturesque group of cottages on Arlington Row in the beautiful village of Bibury is without doubt one of the most photographed Cotswold scenes.

Arlington Row, which is owned by the National Trust, was built around 1380 from local stone and began life as a monastic wool store.

It was converted into a row of weavers’ cottages in the 17th century for them to provide de-greasing cloth for Arlington Mill. 

Henry Ford thought Arlington Row was an icon of England. On a trip to the Cotswolds he tried to buy the entire row of houses to ship back to Michigan so that he could include them in Greenfield Village.

It is probably also now the most depicted village in the world because since 2010, a picture of the former weavers' cottages in Arlington Row has appeared as an intricate image of the front inside cover of all newly-issued UK passports, since 2010, as a way to deter forgers. It has been used as a film and television location, most notably for the films Stardust and Bridget Jones's Diary.

As a result of this, it is now a main tourist destination for tourist visiting the traditional rural villages, tea houses and many ornate protected buildings of the Cotswold District, accordingly it is one of six places in the country featured in Mini-Europe, Brussels

This swan was sataling us for food.

The river's water was surprisingly exceedingly clean and clear.

Gorgeous looking garden belonging to the Swan Brasserie & Hotel. 

Stopping off for lunch at The Catherine Wheel.

Bibury actually has quite a well known Trout farm, so lunch had to be trout to see how it tasted, and it didn't disappoint.

So much green in Bibury.

After lunch we headed off to Chipping Campden which was about a 40 minutes drive away from Bibury.

Chipping Campden is a small market town in the Cotswold district of Gloucestershire, England. It is notable for its elegant terraced High Street, dating from the 14th century to the 17th century. Today, like Bibury, it is a popular Cotswold tourist destination with old inns, hotels, specialist shops and restaurants.

At the village's centre stands the Market Hall with its splendid arches, built in 1627, which you can see on the right in the above photo.

The High Street is lined with honey-coloured limestone buildings, built from the mellow locally quarried oolitic limestone known as Cotswold stone, and boasts a wealth of fine vernacular architecture.

“Chipping" is from Old English cēping, meaning "a market, a market-place."  A rich wool trading centre in the Middle Ages, Chipping Campden enjoyed the patronage of wealthy wool merchants.

Before heading back to London, we broke for Cream Tea. Look at the size of that scone. 

If you want to get a taste and feel of how charming England can be, then definitely grab the opportunity to visit the Cotswolds.