The Cotswold Way. Kev Reynolds
Kelston Round Hill, from Prospect Stile (Stage 13, Southbound; Stage 1, Northbound)
The wolds form part of an extensive belt of oolitic limestone that runs from Dorset in the south to Yorkshire in the north. The highest and broadest part of this belt is an undulating tableland, raised on its western side and draining gently towards the east, down to the Thames Valley and the Oxfordshire Plain. On its western side, where the Cotswold Way goes, the scarp slope falls abruptly to the Severn Plain, revealing its most dramatic features. This sharp-edged tableland has long jutting prows and spurs, time-moulded coombes and island-like outliers, plateaus fuzzed with woodlands and a grid of drystone walls.
Numerous mounds provide evidence of a long history of occupation along the very rim of the escarpment, from which early man scanned the broad views, alert to approaching danger. Today the Cotswold wayfarer seeks those same vantage points as highlights of the walk, places on which to sprawl in the grass and dream among the flowers.
To read more about the Cotswolds see the list of recommended books in Appendix C.
Geology
About 180 million years ago, the region now known as the Cotswolds was covered by a warm, shallow sea. On its bed settled the shells of tiny creatures along with sediments of sand and clay. Over untold millennia these sediments were compressed into the oolitic limestone that was pushed up to form the very backbone of the land, and which provided the stone that has since been used for the construction of countless lovely cottages, manor houses and churches, not to mention the long miles of drystone walling seen almost everywhere.
The Cotswold mass has an eastward tilt, with the sharp face of the escarpment to west and north, and the limestone resting on several thicknesses of soft Lias clays. Thanks to that tilt, natural weathering processes are aided in their slow but steady destruction of the whole area: streams are constantly weakening the scarp slope, the clays slip and overlying rock crumbles without its former support. Thus the scarp has become a corrugation of bays and projecting prows, similar to a coastline, but without the tides of an ocean lapping at its base. Yet even without the wash of tides the scarp is being worn away and pushed further east and south. ‘Outliers’ such as Cam Long Down near Dursley, Bredon Hill near Evesham, and Dundry Hill to the south of Bristol, provide evidence of the former position of the Cotswold scarp and suggest that the wolds once spread throughout the Severn Vale.
At the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, the bare bones of the Cotswolds were given a flesh of vegetation. At first, no doubt, the wolds would have been colonised by deciduous woodlands, but in Neolithic times clearings were made and primitive forms of agriculture attempted on the virgin land. With successive generations the open spaces grew until, by the Middle Ages, the Cotswolds were one vast sheep walk. Then the process of agricultural evolution exchanged pasture for arable land and, following the Enclosures smaller fields were created. Now, it appears, the wheels of evolution are turning once more.
Plants and wildlife
Three seasons’ colours on the Cotswold Way
To the flower-loving wayfarer Cotswold limestone brings a rich treasury of orchids (green-winged and early purple in late April and May, common spotted, pyramid, musk, bee and frog in the full flush of summer), harebells and cowslips in the meadows, wild garlic (ramsons) massed with bluebells in damp, shaded woodlands in springtime, following a green carpet of dog’s mercury towards the end of winter.
Cleeve Common contains the highest land on the Cotswold Way, at over 1000ft (300m), and is one of the last remaining ancient grasslands. As many as 150 species of herbs and grasses may be found there, and it is now a Grade 1 site of special scientific interest.
White oxeye daises are abundant among the grasslands. Bird’s-foot trefoil, scabious, kidney vetch, thyme, salad burnet and hoary plantain, rockrose and knapweeds all combine to provide a tapestry of colour, while the hedgerows are often tangled with wild clematis (old man’s beard), and clumps of hawthorn shower the slopes with a froth of bloom in springtime.
Bullfinches and yellow hammers flash to and fro among the hawthorn bushes, alternating between thorn bush and gorse. Woodpeckers rattle the deadwoods, buzzards and kestrels hang seemingly motionless high above open hill slopes, alert for any sign of voles or mice far below. Pheasants will almost certainly threaten the unwary with heart failure as they practically explode from under your boots as you wander along the overgrown edge of a field, or through a woodland in autumn. Deer may be sighted in some of the larger woodlands and, with a short detour from the way into Dyrham Park, there’s a large herd of fallow deer, reckoned to be one of the oldest in Britain, while foxes and badgers, rabbits, hares and countless grey squirrels may all be seen along the way.
Man in the landscape
A steep wedge of a sunken track takes the Cotswold Way between North Nibley and the Tyndale Monument (Stage 9, Southbound; Stage 5, Northbound)
Man in the landscape could well be the walk’s theme. As we have seen, the Cotswolds have no vast wilderness, no raw mountains or trackless moorland; it is not a countryside that threatens or bullies, but one that welcomes. Man has lived in harmony with nature for a long time here, using as a basic building material the very substance of the land, exhibiting a rare degree of artistry in the moulding of wall, doorway and crooked roof, until even the villages themselves appear to be an extension of that land, an integral part of the landscape.
Instead of shunning habitation, as do many other long-distance paths, the Cotswold Way actively seeks out the timeless villages and towns that are among the loveliest features of the region. But timeless though they may seem, they are only comparatively recent additions to a landscape that has been worked, in some form or another, for 5000 years and more.
The first ‘Cotsallers’ were nomads, hunter-gatherers who drifted through what was then a heavily wooded region, but made little visual impact upon it. It was Neolithic man, around 3000BC, who first began to clear patches in the woodland cover and to till the soil, and in so doing started a primitive form of landscape management. These groups of New Stone Age agriculturalists left behind some 85 burial tombs scattered throughout the region, among the finest being Hetty Pegler’s Tump and Belas Knap, both on or very close to the Cotswold Way. These ancient relics are typical of what has become known as the Severn-Cotswold Group: large cairns of stone with a covering of soil, and internal passageways lined with drystone walling which open into burial chambers. It has been estimated that some of these tombs must have involved about 15,000 man-hours to build, which indicates a surprising level of social involvement and organisation.
As well as Hetty Pegler’s Tump and Belas Knap, there is another similar burial mound of the same period on Frocester Hill, while at Crickley Hill near Birdlip recent excavations reveal evidence of a 3 acre (1¼ hectares) Neolithic causewayed camp. This contained a village protected by earthwork defences of a double ditch and dry walling topped by a palisade. The discovery of flint arrowheads and items of charred fencing suggest that life in the New Stone Age was not entirely peaceful.
Neolithic man was replaced by tribes of immigrants from the Low Countries. These so-called ‘Beaker People’ of the Bronze Age lived a mostly nomadic existence, raising stock and undertaking a primitive form of cultivation before moving on. The most significant evidence of their occupation of the Cotswolds (although these are not always clearly visible) is in the form of round barrows, contrasting with the long barrows in which their predecessors had buried their dead. Although there are more than 350 of these round barrows, none of any importance are actually to be seen along the Cotswold Way.
The Iron Age
What is visible, however, is a series of hill and promontory forts dating from the Iron Age, which lasted from about 700BC until the Roman occupation. The work of Belgic immigrants known as Dobunni, it is thought that these defended enclosures served different purposes. Some clearly contained working communities with villages of long houses, some were market