Going to London next month. Our plan is to take early train to Bath, see Bath and spend night. Next AM will pick up car and head to Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathederal heading to Broadway in Cotswolds to spend night. Day 3 will be spent in Chipping Campden, Stow on the Wold and Moreton in Marsh where we will spend the night. Day 4 will be spent in Statford Upon Avon and at Warwick Castle spending the night in Warwick. Day 5 we are driving to Birmington, dropping the car and taking train to Edinburgh.


Is this rushing things? The car drop off closes at 1300 on Saturday and is closed on Sunday, which is my reason for this schedule.

Please make any suggestions on changes to this schedule that you feel are needed. Thanks for the help.

Hi Sheinberg, top this in the morning because this post will sink and our Brit Friends are now asleep.

It sounds doable to me. I stayed in Broadway for four nights this past spring and we drove to several cotswolds towns each day. It would be a pain, however, if it's raining. Driving there is not so easy.

I recommend the Olive Branch Guest House in Broadway. They recently won "Best B&B in the UK." I also recommend The Swan for dinner --it's within walking distance of the B&B.

We did a similar trip last October. Your plan sounds entirely doable, if a bit rushed. Things are pretty close to each other in the Cotswolds which helps. You won't even begin to see it all in such a short time, but it will give you a nice feel for the area...

-Kevin

The distances are pretty titchy and you could easily do all that driving in a not very hectic morning.

Incidentally, unless you actually want to see Birmingham (and it has some of the world's best industrial archaeology), it's a million times easier to drive to Birmingham International (BHX) station, about ten miles out of town at the airport/exhibition centre complex, and dump the car there. Roughly half the Birmingham-E'boro trains go through BHX, and there are trains into the main New Street station every few minutes if you're booked on a train that doesn't. It's less than 15 mins from Warwick to BHX: follow the signs for Birmingham airport

Whether it's rushed or not depends on your attitude. The Salisbury/Stonehenge bit and the Stratford/Warwick Castle bit are both full of great "must-see" (ugh, what a horrible and silly word) sights - though you'd probably get more out of day 4 if you allocated a good 90 minutes to Warwick parish church, bought its guide book and read it - in detail - in the Beauchamp chapel, which is one of the two great repositories of English pre-Reformation art. The memorial brasses before the altar in the main bit of the church are also fabulous (read them and weep)

The Cotswold bit doesn't have any similar great sights: the towns you're visiting are pleasant, but hardly jaw-dropping. There's no point charging on to see the next of these towns, as there's little in the next that wasn't in the last. Drive from Broadway to Stratford the route you're planning and you'll do it in 90 mins even if you obey the speed limits.

What makes this area special is something you can appreciate only by taking it very slowly. Each of the towns you're visiting has a 4/5 mile circular walk through the fields around it, the most scenic being the one up to the top of Broadway Hill, though the villages around Ch. Ca. are more interesting. Get any of the "lots of nice walks round here" booklets from any local shop and do at least one.

The Cotswolds weren't designed to be seen from a car on one of those paths we tarmacked in the late 1700's: they're at their best seen from the thousands of miles of footpath riddling the area we didn't get round to tarmacking because those damn factories in Manchester, in collusion with those cotton ginners in the Carolinas, were destroying the Cotswolds' economic base and we couldn't afford the tar. So the area sort of stayed in aspic till the late 20th century when the NIMBY telecommuters took it over.

And that's why, in addition to walking the paths, you really need to dig into a town. Get a good guide book to one (of the four, Chipping Campden would win hands down) and follow it in detail. Nothing will compete with Florence or Angkor Wat: but it's the plethora of detail about human life over eight centuries - all in English - that makes the place worth digging into.

And unless you're addicted to useless cookery gadgets (in which case Scott's of Stow can easily take up a morning) or want to see truly outrageous pricing (for which the organic booze section at Daylesford Farm, near Stow, sets standards New York or London can't match), your life will be no less the worse for missing Stow or Moreton to give even more time to the medieval textiles tucked away in the shadows of Chipping Campden church.

Thanks for the great comments, please keep them coming. This is the type of information that I need to make this trip sucessful. Once I have the route and cities determined I can make my auto reservations.

I see another thread in which you say you're now spending 3 nights in Broadway at the Olive Branch. That being the case, I think you can certainly skip Moreton. I happen to like Stowe.

Here is a website for events & other info in the area.

http://www.cotswolds.info/cotswold-events.shtml#nov