Carol made breakfast in the small cottage kitchen, and then we ate out on the picnic table on the bucolic upper yard. It was quite a pleasant morning, so we weren't in a rush to get going. We meandered around the various yards of the small farm. We ended up chatting a while with Mick Morrissey, a very pleasant chap and veteran. He turned out to be the third Mick we spent a fair amount of time with on this trip.
Of the three Micks, Mick Morrissey was one of the three nicest (that's my way of saying they are all nice). And then we had another nice conversation with Sally-Anne, and met one of their four adult kids, a daughter who, like mother and father, was quite nice.
When we eventually did get moving, I used the "Cotswolds (yup, it's misspelled on the app) Walks" app to pick out a hike. The app is great, as it gives you GPS while walking, directions on where to park, pubs/cafes en route, distance/time, and a brief description of the hike.
I chose Broadway and Broadway Tower, a four mile hike up to Broadway Tower, which is at the second highest points in Cotswold. The walk begins in the village before heading out through relatively flat, yet bucolic, fields. We crossed a field with two horses who decided they had to follow closely behind. You can count the number of times I've been horseback riding on two hands, and honestly, possible only one hand, so neither Carol nor I are completely comfortable with things like horses and cows (foreshadowing).
As you go from field to field, you transit each field via kissing gates. The kissing gate technology has improved considerably since 1984, but I do miss those old wooden kissing gates. The new metal ones certainly cost less to maintain, but the romance of metal isn't the same as romance of wood. A kissing gate allows people to pass through a fence from field to field, but animals can't get through them. That whole "opposable thumbs" conundrum!
The walking path turned back down to the road we drove in on. It was nice to see at slow speed the quaint-nicity (not a word) that we saw on the way into town. Then, there is a left turn that starts up hill. The elevation gain is only around 800 feet, but it seems like you do it all at once, up over about a mile and a half climb. Thankfully, the route we went up was mostly through woods, while the other (shorter) route would have been almost exclusively in the sun.
By the time we got into parts of the hike up that were sun-blasted, we were high enough to be afforded wonderful bucoloc, albeit hazy, views of the valleys below. We kept going to the top of the Cotswold escarpment. At one point we passed a whole bunch of sheep massed in the corner of the field right by us, so we had a nice conversation with the sheep before moving on.
It was a good, albeit hot, walk up to the Morris and Brown Cafe, which is a couple hundred yards from the Tower. We stopped there to have a light lunch and to keep hydrating.
The Tower was the brainchild of Capability Brown, back when men were men and had names like "Capability." It was the country retreat of writer, designed, and leading socialist William Morris. Given how posh the Tower was for its time (the late 1800s), Morris is proof that no one does hypocrisy as well as socialists do.
We decided not to go into the Tower (pictured below), but to walk around it and then head back down to the village of Broadway. This route was downhill but mostly in the sun. On the way down, I said to three hikes going up that "This is the easier way to go" whilst pointing downhill. They laughed. They are also young and each of them have two working knees. Close to the bottom, the sun got to me, as even my ballcap wasn't sufficient protection.
(Editor: "The route was downhill. . .no kidding! The Tower is at the top of the second highest point in Cotswold. Writer: Not everyone pays as much attention as you do, for which I am grateful.)
Once back in Broadway, I rehydrated and started feeling better. We decided to save exploring the town for another day.
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