We stayed in the cute little town of Chipping Campden while

we in the Cotswolds. It was a market town orginally and the

home of the richest Cotswold wool merchants.  An "unspoilt" 

town according to the locals, which means it's not crowded 

with tourist buses during the day. There was a fair amount 

of tourists tho, still, and I had to get up very early in the 

morning to take pictures of the town and some of the houses 

before there was traffic on the streets.  Although the streets 

are a little wider than most European medieval towns,

b/c of the need to herd sheep to the market place, they are still

tiny by our standards.  And unless you're willing to risk life and

limb, which I did a few times, you have to stay on the minuscule

sidewalk waiting for cars and passerby to clear.  

The town itself has hardly been touched in centuries, and many

of the houses still have the thatched roofs, altho they've been

covered w/ wire webbing to keep the birds from pulling out

the thatch.  What used to be a discard material from the crop

is now extremely expensive to get and the roofs are costly to

maintain.  There's a whole group of craftsmen that specialize 

in just that.  

It was a fun town to explore with lots of history and the 

beautiful Gothic St James Church.  We were planning to 

take one of the many walking paths out of town and into 

the country, but it started raining hard and just didn't let up!