Some not entirely obvious reasons to visit Bibury (part I)

Katy Walters / Looking downstream on the Coln, Ablington

The first of a few posts that reveal some of the lesser known aspects of the local villages

There are tons of quite obvious reasons to visit our farm in Bibury. There are the famously chocolate-box views of the village - with Arlington Row being so iconic (a term justified for once) that it has appeared on the inside cover of British passports. There are the rolling Cotswold hills, interspersed with lush valleys thronging with wildlife. There’s the farm itself, organic meadows edged with strips of woodland and ramshackle dry stone walls.

But here is the first of some less obvious reasons to visit - a few things that might provoke your curiosity - from someone who grew up in the area. The first concerns a wonderful book.

Ablington, just half a mile away, is the settlement referred to in the countryside classic A Cotswold Village published in 1899. It was written by J Arthur Gibbs who was lucky enough to have inherited the manor, including the amazing Elizabethan manor house. He loved it so much he spent as much time as possible there, enjoying all the traditional country pursuits and leaving a fascinating record of a rural civilisation that has pretty much entirely disappeared.

One highlight is his fleeing his City counting house for the westbound train on the news that the mayfly are rising - clouds of insects that would put the local trout into a feeding frenzy that a fisherman could benefit from (he was also a first-class cricketer, and there’s plenty on this local pastime too). Another is his account of local radicalism, a tradition created largely by dissenting weavers that was still provoking the squire at the turn of the last century. Finally, to read of the Christmas mummers - local players who performed age-old dramas that intermixed the pagan and the Christian and toured the village in the festive season - is a fascinating insight to another aspect of the local culture that has totally disappeared.

As you’ve probably gathered there is quite a strong elegiac feeling to the book. The knowledge that J Arthur Gibbs died of heart failure at the age of 31 makes his desire to the seize the day and live a country life rich in experiences and observations even more poignant.

So when you visit the idyllic Ablington - the part of the village closest to the manor and around the river compares to anything you’ll find in more famously beautiful Cotswold villages - remember that the day before yesterday it was a lot stranger and more exotic than it looks.

(You can buy the book here. But I would avoid the abridged Alan Sutton edition as it won’t give you the full and detailed picture of what he got up to and how he viewed the world).