The Cotswolds 2022

It’s been a while since my last post on our trip to England in September of this year. I have a goal to finish my posts before the end of the year. Our tour with Go Cotswolds, a small family owned touring company, was called Cotswolds in a Day.

On Thursday September 15th (two months ago!) we walked to the Oxford Train Station to be picked up for our day in the Cotswolds. At the station while waiting for the tour van we met another couple waiting for the tour. We enjoyed getting to know them and connecting some dots in our backgrounds that intersected. The rest of the tour group arrived and we hit the road for our first stop which was Chipping Campden. We had a set amount of time to enjoy the village. We chose to spend our time at St. James Church. That will be a separate post.

In 2013 and in 2014 we visited Chipping Campden and my posts are here in 2013 and here in 2014.

From Chipping Campden we stopped at Dover’s Hill for some panoramic views.

It was breezy!

On the way to Snowshill we passed The Broadway Tower.

St. Barnabas Church in Snowshill

Snowshill village sits on the top of the escarpment above the villages of Broadway, Buckland, and Laverton. It is a secluded village where ancient pretty cottages and a 19th century church cluster around a small green. As its name implies – if there is any snow about then you will find it here first.

This was our tour group on this day.

In 2014 Dear and I enjoyed this little village and my post is here.

The weather was good with beautiful skies. Our next stop was Moreton in Marsh where we would enjoy some lunch which left little time to explore.

I hurried from our lunch table at the Talbot Inn so I could get some photos of the wonderful door on the back side of St. Edward’s Church.

If you walk around the churchyard towards the north porch, you will stumble upon what’s known locally as ‘The Yew Tree door’ or ‘The Hobbit door’.

“Speak friend and enter”

In 2014 we had more time in Stow on the Wold and my posts with more information are here and here.

Next time the villages of Bourton on the Water and Bibury.

Signs from England

We saw some great signs when we were in England. Pubs and Inns have some great unique signs.

This one really cracked me up…how fresh can Lobster be from Canada to Windsor, England? I suppose it can be flown in the same day but the sign still had me smiling.

Some signs around this old house are that the weather is turning on us. Today we filled a yard waste bin with leaves and it’s really just the beginning of the raking season. We are looking forward to a few more soccer games with the Seattle Sounders and since we came in 1st place overall for our MLS season we are really hoping to be able to be in the final game for the MLS championships. If that’s the case that game will be here in Seattle on December 7th! It would be pretty sweet to celebrate our Seattle Sounders 40th Anniversary year and my 40th wedding anniversary with a MLS championship on the same weekend. Hope you were able to follow that.

We get to spend some quality time with our adult kids this weekend and we’re really looking forward to that. If I’m scarce on the internet you will know why. We will be busy eating fish tacos, tomato rice soup, Swedish Pancakes, my mom’s roolyet and besides eating together we will be shooting at pumpkins and other things…

What are your plans for the weekend?

I’m linking up with Lesley for her Signs, Signs; a weekly meme of interesting, funny, ridiculous and unexplainable signs. In the future I hope to post more unique signs.

A Fortnight Ago…

…we enjoyed re-discovering Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. We shopped at the butcher’s, the green grocers, and a few specialty shops along the main road through town. We bought sausages, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, butter, bread, and Cotswold cheese to take back to Fox Cottage.

We found some gifts to bring home for our girls.

We enjoyed the beautiful architecture of the churches in this town. When we got hungry and thirsty we stopped in at…

Pubs have come a long way in England and they are very family friendly and have some good selection of food. Some of course are better than others and we happened to find some very good ones where the wait staff was great and the food was exceptional.

On this day the Eight Bells had sardines on the menu as a main course or appetizer. Since we’ve never, that we can remember, seen sardines on a menu we decided to try the appetizer. They were quite good with a lovely sauce.

This was my proper pie with all the trimmings. The description from the menu: Chicken, Ham and asparagus short-crust pastry pie (with top and bottom), white wine sauce, new potatoes and peas. It was delicious. We had a fun conversation with our waitress on “proper pie”. She was appalled when she ordered pie at another establishment and it came to her with no upper or lower crust but just a round piece of pastry propped up along one side of the filling. It was cute when she exclaimed “how can they call that pie?!”

We also had many of my questions answered by one of the bartenders at Eight Bells. We discussed what was going on at the World Cup in Brazil and talked about futbol in general. Many pubs feature a good selection of beer made at local breweries. After eating and quenching our thirst we were brave enough to venture out on the narrow lanes again.

From Chipping Campden we made our way to Snowshill and I will devote a whole post about that quaint little village.

Cheers From England ~ #2

We had a much needed good rest on Friday night. We woke up to birds singing and a light drizzle. Our second day in England and the Cotswolds specifically brought us to the town of Chipping Camden. We really enjoyed this town last year with Josh and Laura and it was nice to go back and explore it further. We also had the fun task of buying a few groceries to have at the cottage. We plan to cook an “English Breakfast” at the cottage on Sunday morning. We bought fresh eggs and a variety of sausages at the Butcher. We bought some tomatoes and mushrooms from the grocer. We bought a fresh baked loaf of bread from the Boulangerie. We bought some Damson Preserves and butter from another small shop on High Street. We also bought some local Cotswolds Cheese from the Cheesemonger. After we had all our supplies we enjoyed a great meal at the Eight Bells and had some fun talking World Cup Soccer with the locals. We braved some very narrow lanes to get to Snowshill to see some lavender fields in bloom, too.

Now we are back at the cottage and I hope to catch the Netherlands v. Costa Rica game on the telly soon.

Hope your Saturday is going well.

St. James Church, Chipping Campden

The church of St James, is a landmark for miles around, can be found at the north end of Chipping Campden. It is a magnificent example of an early perpendicular wool church, rebuilt in the 15th century.

We walked away from the village center to walk about The Church of St. James. We really enjoyed the views of the church and from the church.

And from the inside of the church…

” The finely carved canopied tomb of Sir Thomas Smythe is on the North wall in the sanctuary and is the most remarkable in the church. He was Lord of the Manor of Campden until his death in 1593. He lived at the court of Henry VIII and was the first Governor of the East India Company.

Some interesting history of the church can be read by clicking here. It was interesting to me to read about the “peal of eight bells”. We passed this Inn on our way back to the town center from St. James.

Hope you all are having a nice weekend and for our friends in Canada I hope you are enjoying your traditional Thanksgiving meals with some loved ones. For the most part we’ve had a very unproductive weekend here at this old house. We did manage to take apart and clean out our dishwasher which revealed some interesting stuff…icky. Maybe the beginning of our week will be more productive. We have some fun plans for the end of this week. How about you?

The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b.

To honor and encourage

Tag Archives: Eight Bells Chipping Campden