Reynolds - The Cotswold Way: Two-way National Trail Description

Ramsons, or wild garlic (Allium ursinum), spreads through the woodlands in great carpets, its beautiful white stars giving contrast to its pungent smell

These are just two random vignettes that spill unbidden from a host of memories gathered along the Cotswold Way, but each time Ive walked the route end to end and others when Ive snatched isolated sections for the sheer pleasure of being there Ive been seduced by the regions special attractions. There are the curving bays and spurs of the escarpment, the beech-crowned heights, open breezy commons, deeply cut dry valleys, mile upon mile of drystone walling from which anxious wrens dart and where snails cling limpet-like to the verticals. I think of honey-coloured cottages, roses wild and nurtured, carpets of bluebells, ramsons and wood anemones, kestrels hovering head-down above the cropped turf, larks warbling from dawn to dusk, a cumulus of sheep on the brow of a distant hill. I remember old churches, Civil War battlefields, and the even older burial mounds and hill forts that pepper the route. I recall beams of sunlight shafting onto the River Severn, clouds rolling over the Black Mountains far away. And the peace. Not silence, but peace. The peace of a countryside comfortable with itself.

A walkers landscape is both a powerful stimulant and an inspiration. Certainly that is true where memories and dreams intertwine in a complex of pleasures on completion of the Cotswold Way.

The Cotswold Way measures 102 miles (164km) on its journey from Chipping Campden to Bath, and its a devious route a switchback, stuttering, to-ing and fro-ing, climbing and falling walk. One moment youre wandering along the scarp edge, with toy-sized farms and villages scattered across the plains far below, the next youre heading down to them to explore a magical village, or a small market town with age in its streets, whose cottages are faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them. Then you head up again, zigzagging back and forth in order to capture the best the wolds can offer.

The national trail acorn symbol adorns Cotswold Way waymarks and signposts

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, plateaux 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.