sudeley, life has new meaning to me

Part two of the mappage catchuppage features a couple of lower-level walks, though not without summit-conquering of a sort, as you may have already seen if you looked at the photo gallery I linked to in the last post. 

Anyway, back in June a group of us decided to get together for a weekend away, as we didn't get to see each other very often for the usual middle-aged reasons: gradual geographical dispersion, kids to be fed and entertained, increasing physical decrepitude, male pattern baldness, piles, gout, etc. We hired an AirBnB in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire with the intention of doing some walking in the Cotswolds and a bit of eating and drinking and general hanging out, shooting the shit and all that. It fell to Steffen and myself to do most of the route-organising and I think we did a pretty decent job, coming up with a long walk on day 1 when we had all day and a slightly shorter one for day 2 when everyone wanted to be on the road back by mid-afternoon. 

Day 1 comprised a 20-kilometre clockwise circular walk starting and finishing at the house and encompassing the highest parts of the entire Costwold group of hills as well as a couple of other points of interest including the Bela's Knap long barrow. The high plateau of Cleeve Hill and Cleeve Common is a pleasant place to be, especially in the warm sunny weather we were fortunate enough to have. Another pleasant place to be is the Rising Sun in Cleeve Hill village where we stopped for a couple of refreshing pints (Otter ales, if I remember rightly) and some light lunch. 

The actual high point of the day, and indeed of the Costwolds as a whole, is the summit of Cleeve Hill at a fairly modest 330 metres (1080 feet). The actual summit is a fairly anonymous trig point a couple of hundred yards from a car park and a couple of radio masts (you can see it marked with a "330" at the bottom of the map below); the grander viewpoint with a single tree, some memorial plaques and benches, another trig point and a toposcope a kilometre or so to the north-west is more impressive, but a few metres lower. Crucially this is also the county high point of Gloucestershire, which enables me to tick that off on my list. Going purely by the county list linked in that magazine article, and not getting involved in an argument about the sense of listing long-defunct counties like Huntingdonshire and Merionethshire, my list currently comprises the following:

England

• Berkshire
• Cornwall
• Cumberland
• Derbyshire
• Devon
• Dorset
• Gloucestershire
• Herefordshire
• Lancashire
• Somerset
• Westmorland

Wales

• Brecknockshire
• Caernarfonshire
• Cardiganshire
• Carmarthenshire
• Monmouthshire
• Pembrokeshire

Scotland

• Aberdeenshire
• Banffshire
• Inverness-shire
• Stirlingshire

In need of sustenance after the walk we had an evening in Winchcombe which included visits to the White Hart and Plaisterer's Arms and a curry afterwards. All very nice, as is the food in the White Hart where those of us who'd come down on the Friday night to wring maximum possible value out of the weekend had gone for dinner.

We had to check out of the house on Sunday morning, so we decided to start day 2's walk a mile or so down the road at Sudeley Castle, which fortunately has a nice big (and free) car park which you don't feel too guilty about making use of without actually visiting the buildings ("castle" is a bit of a stretch; it's a large country house). Sudeley is mainly famous for being the home of Catherine Parr, widow of Henry VIII; she moved there upon remarrying after Henry's death and is buried in the grounds. I must admit I was ignorant of what happened to her after Henry's death, in particular that she'd subsequently married Thomas Seymour, brother of Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, and that for all the "divorced, beheaded, survived" stuff she only outlived Henry by about a year and a half, dying of complications from childbirth in September 1548 at the age of thirty-six.

I would describe this as a pleasant country ramble, memorable for being spent in excellent company and very pleasant weather rather than for anything exceptional about the details. The eleven or so kilometres (clockwise again; gently uphill for the first half, gently downhill for the second) got us back to the car park just after lunchtime and we eased our collective conscience about the car park situation by buying an ice cream from the cafe before heading off home. A few photos from the weekend can be found here.