Bourton-on-the-Water

Bourton-on-the-Water is the busiest of the show villages, the Venice of the Cotswolds by the brochures, with the River Windrush running shallow across the green under a line of low stone bridges. There are five of them, the oldest from 1654, the newest raised for the Coronation in 1953. The green fills with families by ten in the morning. There is a model village built in 1937, an exact replica of the place at a ninth of its size and the only one in the country listed in its own right, a bird park, and a museum of old motor cars. It is lovely, and it is loud, and it empties at dusk like a tide going out.

St Lawrence's carries an odd, handsome domed tower over a much older base, the kind of thing you only notice once the crowd has thinned. Climb out of the valley and the noise falls away within a field.

There are vineyards on these slopes now, oast houses and barns made into homes, lamps coming on among the vines as the light goes. The hills keep their houses well back from the road.

The water and the bridges are what the day comes for, and they are right to come. But the Cotswolds that matters is uphill from the green, behind the trees, where the evening is darker and the doors are already shut.