Walking the Cotswold Way Episode 3 - The Highest Point of the Cotswolds

Hi there and welcome to the Cotswold Explorer. I'm Robin Shapra. We're so looking forward to this we're going to walk the whole of the Cotswold way. We leave Postlip after a lovely beer festival. Don't forget to pop in your diary for next year the 17th to the 19th of July with some regret. This extraordinary house is home to a living experiment which seems to me to have an enormous amount to teach us about living with each other. I guess I'd better come clean and admit that I lived for 13 years with my young family in a divided large house in East Oxfordshire where the children shared a three-acre garden to play in and the adults shared the upkeep. A very much simplified version of Postlip and my children have the fondest memories of their early life. The history of this house is fascinating. At the end of the 19th century it had been neglected for years when Mrs Stuart Foster took it on and recovered its former glory. As you skirt the grounds, as is of course appropriate, the beer festival gives access only three days annually and otherwise it's not open to the public except for weddings and things, you'll see over a lovely dry stone wall the small chapel that's in the grounds of this house. Even in Gloucestershire it isn't every manor house that has its chapel, a distinction that has been Postlip's since the days of Stephen in the mid-12th century. The story goes that owing to the constant violence and civil strife that marked that king's turbulent reign, the tenants of the Lord of Postlip were afraid to attend the services at their parish church and begged him to build a chapel where they might have the benefit of his protection. I have absolutely no idea if that story is true but hopefully we will get our opportunity to visit the place soon to see the original Norman chancel arch and windows. Note also, as you walk this pretty path around the edge of Postlip Hall, the spring that gushes constantly from the hillside. One of the main reasons this part of England has been popular for human settlements since time immemorial is the reliably constant sources of fresh water. These springs emerged from the side of these hills all along the escarpment and this one was clearly covered and protected at a very early stage and provided water for the estate. Sadly, but probably sensibly, I suspect that that is no longer the case but it will certainly still provide for the livestock. And so we begin the steady climb to the top of Cleve Hill. The Cotswolds, like all ranges of hills wherever you travel, has a wide range of terrain varying in feel and style in a dramatic fashion. Cleve Hill is a perfect example of this. It's a huge bold hill looking more like part of wild Dartmoor than the lush green Cotswold that surrounds it. It stands out almost literally like a sore thumb. Close grazed by sheep over the generations and scraped by rabbits, it's the perfect place for a golf course that feels more like a seaside lynx than an inland course. Adding to the confusion, close to the top of the hill I notice, lying in a rabbit scrape, a perfectly formed little fossilised clamshell. Then of course I notice many more reminding us that these hills used to be underwater. The breathtaking natural forces that raised this sedimentary seabed to the heights of Cleve Hill are beyond our imagination but it's a salutary thought. The blink of an eye in geological times in which we are fortunate enough to live has seen nothing even resembling this kind of upheaval. Not a bad idea to remember that it seems to me. We're standing at what we knew was going to be something of a landmark because we're right at the top of Cleve Hill at the tallest point of Cotswolds and there's a view of such breathtaking beauty from here. You can see almost 360 degrees into the distance. As I speak the Stanway Fountain is playing in the woods over there, we can see it. Oh it's just turned itself off. We can see the Broadway Tower from which we came. We can come all the way around here, you can see Tewkesbury, Abbey and Gloucester Cathedral in that direction. It's just breathtaking and quite an achievement to be so high up. We stopped for our normal picnic lunch under the only tree in the centre of Cleve Hill, giving us a little shade and inducing a sense of false security which made me release Gizmo from his lead. Needless to say within minutes he was missing and I saw him stalking a bunch of free-ranging sheep in the middle distance. Fortunately he responded immediately to my whistle, almost certainly because it was too hot to start chasing sheep, but it just goes to show how important it is to keep our animals under control. Stopping to look at the view of a Cheltenham racecourse it becomes clear that it has been of great importance to people over the ages. Now you can buy a small space on a kind of display board to put up reminders to all that your relational friend enjoyed walking here. The truth is that humans have looked over this landscape for millennia and marvelled at its beauty. Even before the important town of Cheltenham was a glint in the town planner's eye, they saw the value of seeing the Malvern Range in the distance, with Shropshire to the right and Brendan Hill and Dumbleton in the foreground. Even a hint of the Severn Estuary just to encourage the likes of us long walkers in that direction. And so we follow the contours of the hill across fields that haven't changed for centuries, filled with wildflowers and shrubs, challenging our balance, well I should say at least my balance, trying to avoid toppling off the slope to the end of the first half of this episode at the bottom of a little lane lined with gnarled trees that could have come out of a video game and up which we walk taking photographs as we go because the trees look exactly the kind of subject my brilliant painter wife Pip likes to portray. A brownie point in the offing? Well maybe. To be honest I'm quite glad to be walking away from Cleve Hill. It's so desolate, so featureless and I suppose extreme. I look forward to the wooded valleys and green landscape of what's to come. We're heading for Severn Springs which you won't be surprised to discover is an area of plentiful water supply. After a short spell on the road we take again to the countryside walking down shaded lanes where wildlife seems oblivious to our presence. This muntjac deer is young but surprisingly unfazed by gizmos heaving at the lead. There are several nature reserves along this stretch of hills and it shows. Thick thorny scrub feels ancient. Prestbury Hill Reserve is the first we come to which certainly has some of the best unimproved limestone grassland on this patch. The steep stony slopes helped these areas escape the damage of ploughing and agricultural so-called improvements. There's a great variety of flowering plants and grasses and several orchids can be seen if you're fortunate. Musk and bee orchids just too. The butterfly population is also thriving. The Chalk Hill Blue, Small Blue and Duke of Burgundy butterflies can be found in localised colonies. Butterfly Conservation owns and runs this reserve and is always looking for volunteers. Lineover Wood run by the Woodland Trust comes next with some truly ancient beech trees. Some believe to be over 600 years old. I'm not sure we saw it but they say there is one tree that claims to be the third largest ancient beech in England. After a brief climb across a grassy field we come to a strip of wood in which we are glad to take shelter from our very first taste of rain since we started this walk. We've walked the last few days in the most blazing sunshine. It's been wonderful as you probably are aware. Right now for the first time it's raining on us. I'm sitting under a lovely little oak bush sheltering from a rainstorm. It feels extraordinary. I'm almost ecstatic. The Great Dowdswell Estate is our next great woodland stretch with quite a lot of ups and downs all the way to our destination for this episode, Seven Springs. This part of the escarpment has more waterways and streams than any other which makes the landscape full of deeply cut ravines, wooded and steep, cut into the scarp. A wonderful haven for wildlife. Quite a tough task for the Seven Springs has a perfectly reasonable claim to be the source of the River Thames. Others claim this distinction and argument about such an uncertain thing is pointless but certainly if you judge the source as the underground origin of one of the streams that feeds the Thames furthest from the sea then Seven Springs has the edge. We are, it's worth remembering, right on the highest edge of the hills and the streams run in both directions. We are literally at the watershed. Evans writes of the river the source of the River Churn. The source of the River Churn and one of the two claimants to the honour of being considered the source of the Thames, the other being the Thames Hedge near Kemble Junction. The Seven Springs gush out from beneath the roots of some aged trees and form a clear pool into which you may dip your leathern cup and quench your thirst. The water is excellent. I'm afraid I don't know exactly of where he was writing as we are finishing this stage in a slightly unprepossessing lay-by by the side of the main road. So this is the end of one of our little sections. I hope you're enjoying the episodes. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Please do press the notification button and we'll let you know when we put up our next section of this wonderful challenge. Our Just Giving page is easily available. It's just at the bottom of the page here. Please do join us and support our efforts to raise a little bit of money for sepsis research. We'll see you again starting here very soon.