GORGEOUS GARDENS OF THE COTSWOLDS

Remember summer? When the sun strikes hot on bare skin, and gardens breathe forth the scent of roses and lavender? When bees hum happily as they forage, and birds sing from trees that have only just shaken out their new green leaves? If this is your idea of heaven, the Cotswolds – only 75 miles from London and 60 from Birmingham – may be the perfect place to escape this summer.

The Cotswolds landscape is like a geographicalversionofRavel’s Boléro.The rolling hills begin almost imperceptibly in the meadows of the Thames valley at Lechlade to the south-east before rising to a crescendo in the north-west at what is known as the Cotswolds Edge, an escarpment up to 300 metres above sea level, from which land falls away to the Severn Valley and the Vale of Evesham.

The Romans settled here, building a city they called Corinium, now Cirencester. Later, medieval wool merchants made their fortunes grazing sheep on the