Hello and welcome!
Thank you for visiting my website. I am very lucky to live in the beautiful Oxfordshire Cotswolds and have lived here most of my life. I am happiest when exploring the pretty towns and villages full of golden coloured cottages, wandering along rural country lanes and walking through ancient beech woodland and scenic landscapes, camera in hand. There is a rich and diverse mix of ancient farmland and woodland, wildflower meadows, bustling market towns and villages, palaces, castles and country houses, stunning gardens and arboreta to discover and enjoy.
The Cotswolds is a predominantly rural region of South West England that follows a range of falling hills rising from the meadows of the upper River Thames to an escarpment above the Severn Valley and the Vale of Evesham. The area mainly lies across the boundaries of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire and also parts of Somerset, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire. The Cotswolds area is defined by the bedrock of Jurassic limestone that creates a grassland habitat quarried for its beautiful honey-coloured Cotswold Stone. This landscape contains lovely stone-built villages, towns, manor houses and gardens featuring Cotswold Stone. A large area of the Cotswolds has been designated as a National Landscape and it is the third-largest protected landscape in England.
The name Cotswold is believed to mean the "sheep enclosure in rolling hillsides" with the term 'wold' meaning hills. There are certainly hills and many sheep! Nearly 80% of the Cotswolds 800 square miles is farmland and there are 4,000 miles of historic stone walls and over 3,000 miles of bridleways and footpaths to explore. The Cotswold Way is a long-distance footpath of just over 100 miles that runs the length of the Cotswold Area of Natural Beauty and there are many places of interest, villages and towns to explore along the way, most notably Broadway Tower, Cleeve Hill and Hailes Abbey. Broadway Tower in particular, is a very recognisable Cotswolds landmark and was the idea of the famous landscaper Capability Brown and was built by architect James Wyatt in 1794. William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, lived occasionally in Broadway Tower which was rented at the time by Cormell Price, a friend of William Morris and other artists.
The Cotswolds receives over 23 million visitors a year and towns and villages such as Burford, Bibury, Bourton-on-the-Water, Castle Combe and Stow-on-the-Wold are often bustling with tourists and visitors in all seasons. The village of Bampton near where I live in Carterton is well known as the filming location for Downton Abbey and regularly has coach loads of visitors!
There are plenty of quieter and less well known villages, towns and countryside spaces to explore in the Cotswolds and these are the places I am instinctively drawn to when out and about with my camera. Although, I am a quite frequent visitor to one of our top attractions, the Cotswold Wildlife Park as it is only up the road!
I hope you enjoy looking at my images and that they might inspire you to visit the Cotswolds. You can follow my travels around the Cotswolds on Facebook, Instagram and Threads and read my upcoming Blog of all the places I will be visiting in the coming year.
I sell all my Cotswolds photographs as prints, and I also have coasters, mugs and a selection of small mounted prints featuring my images. You can find them all in my Online Shop!
