We started out Wednesday night in the town of Moreton-in-Marsh. Got there (a 2 hour car ride from Heathrow -- had we planned better, we could have flown into Birmingham) in time for dinner. Our first day's walk was to Bourton-on-the-Water (not to be confused with Bourton-on-the-Hill), 12 miles, though because our second night's lodging was a bit out of town, we ended up with about 15 miles on our Fitbits.
The countryside is absolutely beautiful, as are the quaint villages we encountered. We had a booklet of very detailed directions, including the relevant segment of the British Ordnance Survey map (their equivalent of the US Geological Survey maps), with instructions such as "go through a field gate, then to the far right corner of the field, through a kissing gate and then a footbridge and another gate" (a field gate is something large enough for a tractor to get through, a kissing gate is a sort of double sided gate, where it "kisses" the second side while you are going through the first side -- a little like a revolving door). While I sometimes found the directions a bit vague, we only go lost 3-4 times in 3 days, and never for more than 5 minutes. It was always obvious from details given like "the Fox Inn will be on your right" that we had made a wrong term.
The whole trip is based on the wonderful notion of "public footpaths" (and bridle paths) all across England. These date from the times when most land was publicly owned, and when the and was given to landowners (I suppose by various kings) the normal paths people used to get from place to place were now on private land. These were made into rights of way (sometimes diagonally crossing a farmer's field or going through a cemetery) that still exist. They are well signed (though we moved from one route to another, so the signs were only confirmation from the written directions that we were on the intended route) and reasonably well maintained. They have names like "The Cotswold Way" "the Heart of England Way" "The Winchcombe Way". The markings can be very strange. See below for one we encountered the first day. This stump is about 2 feet high, and the two yellow markings show the intersection of two paths in the middle of this field. As this picture also shows, you end up crossing fields with cows, sheep, horses, and the occasional bull.
This was our least hilly day, only about 800 ft vertical, with no serious hills, only lots of ups and downs. Some additional pictures:
A typical house of Cotswold stone (a soft sandstone).
The typical stone fence for the area. The wall is dry stone (no mortar) construction, and in some cases (not this one) the top row is also done without mortar -- and it all fits together snugly.
Here is a random church we passed. I think the flowers are for a wedding.
And this is Jay on one of the tree lined tracks we travelled on.
We had lunch in Stow-on-the-Wold, one of the very picturesque (and pretty full of tourists) towns along our route. Excellent pub food and lots to wander around and see (I was, of course, so busy gawking that I forgot to take pictures). Jay had a ham sandwich with some terrific ham he is still raving about, and I had a mediocre tomato soup and a fantastic chicken liver pate with a great homemade chutney on a warm baguette.
We went near Sezincote House, but due to a map reading error, we didn't realize it till we were a mile past it. With a 12 mile day, we didn't feel we had time to return to it. It's an early example of Moghul (Indian) architecture built for a "Nabob of the East India Company" in England. Here's a picture of the exterior from the web.
Our lodging this night was a 5 room Bed and Breakfast. Every place we stayed offered us a full English breakfast (eggs, bacon, blood pudding or other sausage, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans and toast). We tried various subsets, though we didn't get into beans for breakfast.
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