Coln St Aldwyns

Coln St Aldwyns is one of the three Colns, with Coln Rogers and Coln St Dennis upstream, and it is the quietest sort of place, where the quiet is the first thing you notice. A church, a former coaching inn, stone cottages along a single street, and the River Coln somewhere close that you hear before you see. It was never a wool boom town like Stow or Northleach; it has always been an estate and farming village, and it wears that history lightly.

The church of St John the Baptist keeps a fine Norman doorway, carved with a row of beast heads above the arch. The New Inn has poured for travellers on this road for a very long time. Williamstrip Park, the estate behind the village, has shaped the land around it since the early seventeenth century.

At the edges of these villages are the conversions: barns and stable blocks made into houses, kept by people who sold the larger house and stayed for the land. A garden tended hard. A window with a candle lit in it of an evening, for reasons that are nobody's business but the one who lit it.

You come here for the walk along the Coln toward Bibury and the bridge at the bottom of the hill. You stay, if you stay, because no one here is in any hurry to know you, which after a while begins to feel like the highest form of welcome.