15DTM Chipping Campden to Avebury

Or rather Winterbourne Monkton. There’s a few Winterbournes around: chalk streams that run in winter. How they’ve checked the flood maps before building.

Gloucestershire’s finest Cotswolds landscape unfolds before us today. Really quite lanes, rollercoastering across the hills, avoid the honey spots. The Lavender farm was easily identifiable, a new colour on the horizon.

Northleach was a good find, a thriving smallmarket town, once on the stagecoach route to South Wales. Some of the residents seem to have survived since it was given its market charter in 1290. The person making our sandwich, a good decision as no further shops appeared, seemed to think we could wait until the next Millennium. They were good though, munched outside another pretty church in Driffield.

Running parallel with the A419 reminded us what road noise is. The various developments on the Cotswolds Waterparks reminded us of the idyllic adverts in the Sunday supplements: reality is different.

This also is a transition into the Wiltshire landscape. More arable than pastoral and the reappearance of bricks. The hill reappears with a vertical jolt at Clyffe Pypard. The clue was in the name. Then a rolling descent towards Avebury.