A WALK AWAY FROM THE COTSWOLD town of Stow-on-the-Wold, site of the final battle of the first Civil War, lies the village of Longborough. Blink and you’ll miss it. Though it has been settled for 5,000 years, its mark on cultural life is a recent one, made possible by the conversion of a chicken barn into an unlikely opera house. It was the dream, realised in 1998, of Lizzie and Martin Graham. They got the idea while watching an opera on television.
Its 500 seats come from the refurbished Covent Garden. The
