At the end of February we spent 3 nights at the Maytime Inn in Asthall near Burford in the Cotswolds. It’s a great time of year to visit the area since there’s almost nobody about during the week, and overall we were very lucky with the weather, although it was cold and blowy and did range from cloudless sunshine, through broken cloud & drizzle, all the way to a burst of horizontal snow!
We stopped on the drive there to stretch our legs in the National Trust Stowe Estate, where the mostly grey skies suited my infra-red camera, although the sun broke through intermittently to cast beams of light across the classical landscape.
The West Lake Pavilion
The Rotunda
Gothic Temple.
Stowe School Lion.
While staying in Asthall we walked locally and from Bourton on the Water. The weather was brighter in general, so I carried the conventional camera.
Asthall Manor & St Nicholas’ Church.
The gorgeous Jacobean Asthall Manor was owned by the Mitfords in the 1920s and it makes a picturesque companion to the village church.
Snowdrops in the Churchyard.
Asthall.
We had lunch in Lower Slaughter, a real Cotswolds’ honeypot which benefited greatly from there being only a handful of ambling tourists in February, and we then drove the short distance to Bourton on the Water where we parked for a gentle 5-mile amble through idyllic English farmland through the village of Wyck Rissington.
Lower Slaughter.
View across the fields to St. Peter’s, Little Rissington.