Lucy & Richard from Cotswolds Guided Tours, just love sharing their local area with visitors. If you want to learn more about the Cotswolds then we hope you find this Cotswolds travel guide useful. Remember you can always join us for a day trip exploring, you have two options our private Cotswold tours or our small, mixed group sightseeing Cotswolds tours. We are open all year round, so book & be our special guests for a wonderful day trip.

 

The charming hillside village of Snowshill is located 2.5 miles South of Broadway. Located on the slopes just below Oat Hill, this peaceful village set around the village Church of St Barnabas has its own pub 'Snowshill Arms' along with the highly regarded 'Snowshill Manor' owned by the National Trust. The name of the village means where the 'snow-lies-long' however the village did not live up to its reputation back in 2000/2001 ! For those of you how love the Bridget Jones movies, the opening scene of the first film 'Bridget Jones Diary' was filmed in Snowshill, however this snowy scene had to be created & the whole village was turned into a movie set with tonnes & tonnes of fake snow! Snowshill has become most famous over the summer months due to a nearby farm, Snowshill Lavender where 40 different varieties are grown over 90 acres see flocks of visits over the 5-6 weeks they are open for the public to wander through the fields, cameras at the ready! The manor house is another enjoyable location to while away a few hours, this fine Tudor property with its maze of rooms was once owned by Winchcombe Abbey between the 812 to the mid 1500's. It was then gifted to Katherine Parr, the lucky last wife of Henry VIII. For those of you who having heard of our Tudor King, he had six wives, all with varying fates, the easiest way to recall Henry's wives. Is as follows; Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived. So Katherine Parr being Henry's last wife outlived him! 

The next owner of note was Charles Pagnet Wade, who in 1911 had inherited a huge fortune from his families sugar plantations & he purchased the manor. Charles loved to travel & amassed an incredible quantity of artefacts from around the globe. These he stored in his manor house. Charles died with no heirs & he gifted the manor house, along with his collections (some 40,000 pieces) to the National Trust in 1951. 

Henry Ford, the American Industrialist in a similar way to Charles Wade has a passion for collecting things on his travels. The average person may by a souvenir, perhaps an antique, that they can take back home to remind them of their trip. However when money is no object then I suppose we are not limited to the weight of our suitcase! Henry Ford had a passion for Cotswolds, its properties in particular & he went on a shopping spree buying up little cottages & shipping them back to the States to be rebuilt. He did exactly this with the Old Forge here in Snowshill, just imagine that!