Info on the Cotswolds, England
 

I am looking for contact information for good blogs (not commercial ones) written by either locals or ex-pat (Americans), as well as currently published books on the Cotswolds to access information as a long term visitor (not as a tourist passing through). If you have any helpful information I'd appreciate it. :)

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...any-advice.cfm

Fodor's has a resident Cotswolds expert - a real resident of the hills - search flanneruk in the Search the Forums box for his always spot on takes, like in the post referenced above he comments on, on the Cotswolds. BTW his dog knows a whole lot about the hills to boot!

Here is a town/village guide I have saved on my computer:

http://www.cotswolds.com/Portals/4/p...lagesGuide.pdf

thanks Pal and dorfan!

btw, dorfan, I've just browsed thru the guide you posted. Very nice! I like that there are references to contact local information centers.

Hopefully flanneruk will respond as well.

He hasn't posted for several days -- perhaps they are away for the holidays.

thanks janisj

ttt

The short answer is that there are virtually none.

There are millions of books and blogs published by Cotswold residents (we don't label people by their passport here): the knowledge industry is a far greater contributor to the Cotswold economy than tourism or agriculture - bigger even than racing car manufacture.

But those books are about the next three years' prospects for Chinese spinning and weaving, the geology of North Sea oilfields, the anthropology of Amazonian tribes or the depiction of maternity in 14th century Umbrian freschi (to take the last couple of months' output from the houses within 15 yards of mine): the blogs cover a slightly wider range of issues.

Virtually none waste energy wittering about their neighbourhoods.

There are a few precisely-targeted recentish books (like the Cotswold Line Promotion Group's guides to walks between Hereford and Oxford using the Cotswold Line's stations), a number of towns have local histories and most small towns have the odd insight on their websites, though they're usually about lists of local societies, the timing of rubbish collections, the next amateur opera and the like.

There's a short list of relevantish books at https://sites.google.com/site/evenlo.../local-history, and that list misses out Godfrey Hodgson's "Sweet Evenlode": all preoccupied with the area's human or natural history, rather than the minutiae of daily life today.

We don't hold much with triumphalistic gibberish about "the Cotswold way of life" (the kind of stuff best left to truly insular villages like New York) and most people with time on their hands here use it to become an expert on a new subject. Nor do we waste much taxpayers' money on tourist information centres: the "guide" dorfan refers to is a piece of puffery put out by a consortium of tourist promoters in Gloucestershire, which lacks a real economy, so needs to attract visitors. The "guide" therefore pretends the most interesting bits of the area - like Burford - don't exist.

But if you've got specific questions, someone here can probably point you in the right direction.

Two books might be of interest; Bradt guides are particularly good and the Rough Guide is useful too.

www.bradtguides.com/Book/193/Slow-Cotswolds.html

http://www.roughguides.com/shop/roug...tswolds/ebook/

Plus, do a google search using the term cotswolds*blogs* to return the results you want

Don't tell the locals but there appears to be an American woman living in the Cotswolds doing utterly common things like keeping a blog and writing a book about her adventures! Tut tut.

www.americaninthecotswolds.com

I don't know anything about this woman. I just did a quick google search for Cotswolds, American and expat.

thanks flanner, sofarsogood and BKP!!