Painswick

Painswick is called the Queen of the Cotswolds, and it earns it from the hilltop, looking out over the steep valleys above Stroud where the cloth mills once ran on fast water. The town is built of a paler stone than the honey-coloured north, and its streets are narrow and quiet, with the weavers' old top-floor workrooms still lighting the attics.

The thing people come for is the churchyard. St Mary's is ringed by yew trees clipped into dark archways and domes, planted from the eighteenth century, and by a famous crowd of table tombs. By tradition the yews will never number more than ninety-nine; should a hundredth take root, the story goes, the Devil pulls it out. The actual count has crept past that, but no one in Painswick will thank you for saying so. On the edge of the town is the Rococo Garden, laid out in the 1740s and the only complete survivor of its kind in the country.

Above it all rises Painswick Beacon, an old hillfort with the whole Severn vale laid out below.

Painswick is quieter than the postcard villages and prouder than most, an old cloth town that never quite stopped keeping its own counsel. The Queen, after all, does not explain herself.