Thursday, April 11, 2013

The Cotswolds on a sunny afternoon in Spring



It’s been quite a while since I last posted, mainly due to malaise, and the fact that it’s been a while since I last picked up my camera, predominantly for the same reasons.

But the guilt of having an expensive piece of machinery sat about gathering dust, along with a low hanging chimerical smear of cloud gently, but insistently draping a curtain of shame over the back of my mind for not ‘getting out there’ and ‘capturing the light’ etc etc, ad nauseum, was enough to spur me to action.

So action is what happened.

I took an action packed trip up the road and got some pictures my local area, so here they are, with a bit of info culled from various tourist sites about the Cotswolds.

“The Cotswolds is the most 'quintessentially English' and unspoiled region of England where you cannot help but fall in love with the uniqueness of it.” 





The Cotswolds is an area of England about the size of greater Tokyo. Popular with both the English and visitors from all over the world, the Cotswolds are well-known for gentle hillsides (‘wolds’), sleepy villages and for being so ‘typically English’ where time has stood still for over 300 years. 




The name Cotswold is sometimes attributed the meaning, sheep enclosure in rolling hillsides, incorporating the term, wold, meaning, woodland. The English Place-Name Society has for many years accepted that the term Cotswold is derived from Codesuualt of the twelfth century or other variations on this form, the etymology of which was given, 'Cod's-wold', which is 'Cod's high open land'. Cod was interpreted as an Old English personal name. It has subsequently been noticed that "Cod" could derive philologically from a Brittonic female cogname "Cuda", which is the name of a mother goddess thought to have resided in the Cotswold region in Celtic mythology 



It is one of the most beautiful areas of England, known and loved by people across the world. It is the largest of 38 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in England and Wales: an area of warmth and clarity with stone walls and buildings, open skies, rolling grasslands, beech woods and captivating villages, which make it an outstanding English landscape - a landscape once experienced, never forgotten. 




The region attracts 38 million visitors a year with tourism being the principle industry, generating over £130 million a year. The Cotswolds has one of the highest non-urban growth rates in the Country.





No I don't know what this all means either, but there you go.



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