Walking the Cotswolds, Day Five

Our hosts last night had a book on the shelves in their hallway: 50 Crap Towns in the UK. Painswick, the village where we were staying, definitely wasn’t one of them. It was yet another picture-postcard Cotswolds village. Middleyard, where we are tonight, is a little more down-to-earth. It’s a suburb of Stroud. The pub down the road where we ate dinner is more like the pubs I remember from previous visits to Britain: a little shabby but good enough.

We had two odd animal encounters today. At Haresfield Beacon, a lookout point with 360-degree views of the valley below, a herd of cows was occupying the footpath. They were reluctant to share and snorted ominously as we approached. I was mindful of the story about the woman in Lincolnshire who was trampled to death by an angry cow while walking and avoided making eye contact while murmuring “that’s a good cow” in what I hoped was a reassuring voice. We were between the cows and the escarpment, which didn’t make me feel any better. But they were only bluffing.

Later, as we entered King’s Stanley, a horse became convinced that Christine was harbouring something edible and followed her, mumbling her pack and slobbering on her water bottle.

Our route today took us along footpaths and bridleways and restricted byways; through ginnels, snickets, closes and alleys; along roads and highways and streets; through woods and forests; on bridges across streams, railway tracks, a river; over pastures, through a wheat field and a hop yard.

Unlike the Camino Francés, much of this trail is on private land, something that continues to amaze me. Imagine Canadian farmers putting up with strangers wandering across their pastures and through their farmyards! I can’t.

Tomorrow is our shortest walk on this trip. Our destination, the village of Dursley, is the inspiration for the name of Harry Potter’s adoptive family. We’ll see if it’s as cruelly repressive and miserable.