Painswick Cotswolds
Painswick is widely regarded as the most beautiful village in the Cotswolds, a settlement of exceptional architectural quality in the steep Cotswold escarpment whose combination of grey-white Painswick stone buildings, the celebrated churchyard with its ninety-nine clipped yew trees and the surrounding rolling countryside creates a consistently admired scene of English rural beauty. The village sits at the junction of several Cotswold valleys and the views from the surrounding hills encompass some of the finest pastoral landscapes in Gloucestershire. The Church of St Mary, whose Gothic tower dominates the village, is famous above all for its churchyard, where table tombs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent the finest collection of this funerary monument type in England. The table tombs were produced by a local school of stonemasons who worked in the distinctive grey-white Painswick limestone and developed an ornamental vocabulary of baroque detail of considerable sophistication, their work representing a peak of the English provincial masonry tradition in a period when Painswick was prosperous from the wool and cloth trade. The ninety-nine clipped yew trees that shade the churchyard are the subject of a legend that the devil always removes a hundredth yew before it reaches maturity. The Painswick Rococo Garden, a short walk from the village, is the only surviving complete example of the English Rococo garden style, a short-lived and playful alternative to the landscape garden fashion of the mid-eighteenth century whose characteristic combination of intimate garden buildings, serpentine paths and naturalistic planting in a formal framework survives here in a form that has been carefully restored since 1984. The Cotswold Way national trail passes through the village and the surrounding escarpment walking provides excellent views of the Severn Vale below.