Burford
"It's the steepness that gets you — a high street that actually goes somewhere."
Burford announces itself with a descent. The high street runs straight downhill for almost half a kilometre, from a crossroads at the top to the River Windrush at the bottom, and the gradient is steep enough that you find yourself leaning back slightly as you walk, the way you would on a ship in mild weather. The buildings on either side are a compressed history of Cotswold commercial life: fifteenth-century wool merchants’ houses, Georgian inns with carriageways wide enough for coaches, Victorian shopfronts, and here and there a gap where you can see through to the gardens behind, which are unexpectedly lush and private.
The antique trade has colonised Burford with a thoroughness that suggests historical inevitability. There are perhaps fifteen shops within two hundred metres, ranging from serious dealers in Georgian furniture to places that sell Victorian botanical prints and Sheffield silver teapots and objects that resist categorisation. I spent an hour in one that had stacked its inventory into every corner without apparent system, and found, on a shelf behind a pile of Penguin paperbacks, a hand-drawn map of the Cotswolds from 1934 with someone’s holiday notes pencilled in the margins. Bought it immediately. It now lives in my kitchen in Mexico, which strikes me as an appropriate journey.
The church at the bottom of the hill, beside the river, is one of the largest in the Cotswolds — another wool church, built in stages from Norman times onward, with a spire that serves as a navigation point for the entire valley. Inside, the brasses and memorial tablets are extraordinarily dense, the walls thick with the names of wool merchants and their wives, the inscriptions in Latin and English and occasionally both. There is a peculiar social history here, compressed into stone: who was rich enough to be memorialised, in what style, in what language. In the north transept there is a mark scratched into the wall plaster by a Leveller soldier who was imprisoned in the church after the Burford mutiny of 1649, a few days before he was shot in the churchyard. The scratched name — Anthony Sedley 1649 Prisner — is protected now by a small Perspex panel.
The Windrush at Burford is broader and slower than it is upstream. There is a footbridge beside the old weaver’s cottage at the river’s edge, and from it you can look upstream toward a water mill and downstream toward the buttercup meadows that begin where the gardens end. In June, the meadows are extraordinary — a mass of yellow and white and the specific green of English riverbank that seems too saturated to be real.
The pubs in Burford are old and good. The Lamb Inn has a garden that catches the afternoon sun in exactly the right way, and the bar menu runs to proper things: venison pie with a suet crust, beef dripping on toast with horseradish, a cheeseboard that takes the local sourcing seriously. The beer is from local breweries — Arkell’s from Swindon, Hook Norton from Banbury, ales that taste of the same limestone the buildings are made of, or so I have decided to believe. The town also has a tea room that I visited twice: once for lunch and once because I walked past and could smell the baking from the street.
When to go: June for the meadows and long evening light on the high street. September is quieter and the antique shops are easier to navigate without summer browsers clogging the doorways. The town is busiest on weekends; a Tuesday morning in spring, when you have the descent to yourself, is the correct way to arrive.