Bibury
Bibury in the Cotswolds of Gloucestershire has been described as the most beautiful village in England, a distinction attributed to the Victorian designer and writer William Morris who knew the Cotswolds intimately and recognised Bibury's particular combination of honey-coloured stone buildings, the River Coln running through the village and the famous Arlington Row as the finest expression of the vernacular building tradition that he admired so passionately. The village draws visitors from around the world, and Arlington Row in particular has become one of the most reproduced images of the English countryside in existence.
Arlington Row is a terrace of small stone cottages built in the fourteenth century as a monastic wool store and converted into weavers' cottages in the seventeenth century, their distinctive Cotswold stone roofs, low windows and modest scale creating an image of pre-industrial England that is simultaneously entirely genuine and almost impossibly picturesque. The cottages face a water meadow, Rack Isle, where the weavers once stretched their cloth to dry, which is now a wildfowl reserve that adds a further layer of natural beauty to the scene. The combination of vernacular stone architecture, water meadow and the clear River Coln is what Morris was responding to and what continues to make Bibury distinctive.
The village has a trout farm in the grounds of Bibury Court, itself a fine Jacobean and later country house now operating as a hotel, and the combination of the river, the weir below Arlington Row, the village church of St Mary with its Saxon origins and the surrounding Cotswold farmland creates an experience of considerable concentrated beauty. The inevitable busyness of a site this famous is best managed by visiting in the early morning or in the quieter months of autumn and winter, when the village recovers something of the undisturbed quality that Morris valued.
The Coln valley extends in both directions from Bibury through a succession of equally lovely Cotswold villages including Coln St Aldwyns and Coin Rogers that reward further exploration.