Stow-on-the-Wold

Stow-on-the-Wold sits highest of the wool towns, around eight hundred feet up where the wind finds you on the square and eight roads meet, the Roman Fosse Way among them. A market was chartered here in 1330, and at the height of the wool trade as many as twenty thousand sheep changed hands in a single day. The fair still comes twice a year, in May and October. By day the town belongs to the visitors: the coffee, the antiques, the photograph of the two yews at the church door. They come for the morning and are gone by the time the light goes amber on the stone.

St Edward's stands off the square, its north door set between those two ancient yews, the most photographed doorway in the Cotswolds. The town has seen harder days than a coach park. In March 1646 the last battle of the first Civil War was fought on the edge of it, and the Royalist prisoners were held in the church overnight. A market square that has changed hands for a thousand years keeps its discretion about most of it.

What stays is quieter. Shops with rooms above them, and lamps that come on behind first-floor curtains after the last car has left. There is a rare-books dealer on the square, a green-walled room with a flat above it and a brass key original to the building. On a damp day the old chimney breast still carries a faint smell of the cheese shop it used to be.

The people who matter here are rarely the ones on the square at noon. Come back when the shops have shut, and the town tells you less. That is how it prefers things.