Painswick

The legend says that if a hundredth yew tree is ever planted in Painswick’s churchyard, the devil will pull it up before morning. This might explain why there are currently — depending on whom you ask and how carefully you count — either ninety-nine or ninety-two or one hundred and three yew trees in the churchyard, depending on how you define a yew tree and whether you’re a resident who wants the number to be exactly ninety-nine or a botanist who is less invested in the mythology. I counted eighty-seven before losing count, which seems approximately right.

Painswick is called the Queen of the Cotswolds because its stone is lighter and more silvery than the honey-gold of the north, and because the village climbs steeply up a hill with the churchyard and church tower at its crown. The result is a silhouette — yew trees, Georgian table tombs in pale limestone, a slender perpendicular spire — that appears on the hill as you approach from the valley in a way that is genuinely composed, as if the whole thing has been arranged for maximum effect from a specific viewpoint. It may have been. The wealthy wool and cloth merchants who built the church and its surrounding tombs were not insensible to appearances.

The Rococo Garden at Painswick is one of the finest and least-known gardens in England. It was created in the 1740s in the brief flowering of English Rococo — that moment between formal baroque and the naturalistic landscape garden when designers allowed themselves a certain playfulness — and it was subsequently lost under two hundred years of undergrowth. Its restoration began in 1984 from a single painting made in 1748 showing the original design, and what has been recreated is extraordinary: a narrow valley shaped into a sequence of garden rooms, linked by winding paths, with Gothic alcoves and a Red House and a kitchen garden and a walled garden in the French style, all contained in six acres that feel like they could be fifty.

I walked through it in February, which the owner told me was the best month for snowdrops, and she was correct in the specific and powerful way that people who know a garden through all its seasons are correct. The snowdrops were in drifts beneath the trees, and the valley was so quiet that the only sound was birdsong and the occasional creak of the old beeches, and the whole scene had the quality of something half-remembered, too precise to be a dream but too vivid to be a regular Tuesday.

The village streets reward wandering. The Old Post Office is a fifteenth-century building that has been various things in its life and is currently a restaurant with food that takes itself seriously without being theatrical about it. I had a terrine of local game there that had been pressed and aged to a texture so compact it could be sliced like a book, with piccalilli that was bright with mustard. Painswick’s narrow streets tend upward in all directions, and each turn offers a different angle on the tower and the yew trees, the stone changing colour with the light from silvery-grey to almost white to something close to gold when the sun comes over the hill late in the afternoon.

When to go: February for the snowdrops in the Rococo Garden — genuinely among the finest displays in England. May for the village gardens and the churchyard in full yew canopy. The Clipping Ceremony in September, when the village children circle the church hand-in-hand singing a hymn, is a piece of living tradition with roots no one can quite date and everyone in Painswick seems to take very seriously indeed.