People who live in large, sparsely populated countries have a different definition of ‘nearby’ from ours. I know someone who thinks nothing of driving two hours for their weekly shop, including a stint on a car ferry. Another friend drives twelve hours to their ‘local’ hospital. When we asked my visiting Canadian cousin where she’d like us to take her while she was in England, she said ‘France’. My aunt, her grandmother, chose Scotland.
How lucky we are here in the Cotswolds to have so much within easy reach – not only essential facilities, but places of historic and cultural interest to enrich our lives. My latest discovery on our doorstep is the tiny, historic church of St Andrew at Leighterton. (Other tiny, historic churches are available, as the BBC might say.)
In each episode of both my cozy mystery series, I introduce new characters and settings to old favourites from previous books. This post is about some new faces and an ancient manor house at the heart of my latest Gemma Lamb Cozy Mystery, Artful Antics at St Bride’s.
In this story, St Bride’s School acquires a secretive new pupil, Frieda Ehrlich, whose school fees are sponsored by enigmatic tycoon Sebastian Goldman-Coutts. He’s the new owner of Torrid Manor, which lies hidden behind high hedges and forbidding walls just a few miles from the school’s private grounds in the Cotswolds.
When English teacher Gemma Lamb is invited to visit Torrid Manor, she is astonished to find the historic mansion is almost derelict. With only candles lighting the house, Gemma snatches shadowy glimpses of its former glory.
Why would a supposed billionaire choose such a shabby home? What is he hiding? Or who is he hiding from?
These days, Cotswolds mansions are highly sought after by super-rich celebrities from actors and rock stars to politicians and royalty. Having made their fortunes elsewhere, they escape to a rural idyll. Yet the mansions’ original owners got rich through a very local trade: Cotswold wool.
Image by DRichards2, via Wikimedia under Creative Commons Licence
In medieval times, the thick, curly, golden fleeces of the ancient Cotswold Lion breed of sheep produced the finest wool in the world. It was as prized and prestigious as precious metals and jewels. Cotswold merchants amassed great wealth by exporting wool throughout Europe.
I imagined Torrid Manor to be something like Hidcote Manor. (Picture via Wikimedia under Creative Commons licence.)
Like modern billionaires, these rich merchants invested their riches in property. They commissioned the building of prestigious homes, fashioned from the distinctive golden-hued Cotswold stone.
Many also endowed the construction of magnificent churches. Pictured here is the parish church of St John the Baptist, Cirencester.
As demand soared, market towns sprang up throughout the region as trading centres for sheep and fleeces. If you’ve ever wondered why so many Cotswold town names include the word “Chipping”, it’s because “Chipping” is the local word for “market”. Smaller buildings provided studios and workshops for wool processors: spinners, dyers and weavers. Street names bear witness to their original purpose, such as Dyer Street or Weavers’ Row. Laurie Lee’s local pub was The Woolpack.
The beautiful Cotswold wool town of Painswick (Public domain image via Wikimedia)
Sadly, the Cotswold wool trade declined during the Industrial Revolution, with the rise of the steam-powered mills in the north. But the honey-coloured mansions, churches, and market towns are a lasting legacy of the Cotswolds’ Golden Age of Wool.
In Artful Antics at St Bride’s, Gemma Lamb detects that Sebastian Goldman-Coutts is hiding dark secrets at Torrid Manor, including his own agenda for St Bride’s. So begins her latest quest to save the school, with unexpected consequences…
Extract from Artful Antics at St Bride’s
‘So we’re calling this term’s Essential Skills Challenge, “Raise the Roof with Your New Business”,’ Hairnet announced, making eye contact with each of the teachers in turn as if to ensure our cooperation. ‘As you know, several girls are already running successful businesses in their own modest – and safe – way, trading in home-made jewellery and handicrafts via Itsy Bitsy.’
I assumed she meant Etsy. Modern technology wasn’t her strong point.
‘Those girls can be mentors and role models for the others, in whatever line of business they choose. Although the purpose of these new businesses will be rather different: we will launch the programme with an inspirational and informative talk by someone seasoned in managing a successful business and who has much wisdom to share.’
The bursar seemed to grow a few centimetres taller at this remark, only to shrink back at her next statement.
‘A couple of you have already met Mr Goldman-Coutts, the generous sponsor of our delightful new sixth form pupil, Frieda Ehrlich.’
Hazel and I exchanged glances. Even though, like me, she always tried to see the best in our girls, I don’t think either of us would have applied the adjective ‘delightful’ to Frieda.
‘The rest of you will soon have the opportunity to meet the dear man. He has kindly agreed to address the girls after lunch tomorrow, despite his busy schedule.’
Mavis raised her hand. ‘Miss Harnett, just what is Mr Goldman-Coutts’ line of business that qualifies him to advise a hundred adolescent girls?’
Oriana raised a well-manicured forefinger, as if too indolent to put up her whole hand.
‘Whatever it is, it’s making him extremely rich. I looked up his estate on Google Earth and it’s massive. Torrid Manor’s a huge mansion, with countless outhouses, far more than a home of that size might need for stables or coach houses or garden bothies. He must be fabulously good at whatever his line of business is.’
‘Torrid Manor?’ Judith raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t think anyone had lived there for years.’
‘Nonsense,’ retorted Oriana. ‘He told Hazel and Gemma that’s where he lives.’
Silenced by Oriana’s curt manner, Judith pressed her lips together. I suspected Judith knew more than she was letting on. I decided to have a quiet word with her as soon as I could get her on her own. She had been a wise and supportive friend to me, and I trusted her judgement more than Oriana’s.
‘It doesn’t follow,’ said Mavis. ‘He might have inherited an even property portfolio from his father and be in the process of squandering it on decadent living and business ineptitude. I’m sure we can all think of figures in public life with a similar record.’
‘Actual wealth trumps earning power in my book,’ retorted Oriana. ‘Provided a man’s rich enough for life, I don’t care whether or not he’s an entrepreneurial genius. What matters is the here and now.’
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Cover design by Rachel Lawston inspired by the single-track roads of the Cotswolds in spring
When I first moved to Hawkesbury Upton, I didn’t realise that three of the four roads into the village were partly single track with passing places. Learning to drive in suburban London, my lessons had been exclusively in built-up areas. In my company car, I was clocking up most of my miles on motorways. Negotiating rural lanes required a recalibration of my driving skills.
However, I soon learned to love the local lanes all year round, enjoying seeing the seasons change in the hedgerows and verges – from snowdrops to primroses, from wild garlic to cow parsley.
A few months after moving to the village, with the smugness of the newly-converted, I laughed at a visiting townie friend perplexed by the etiquette of country driving. “Do you really know everybody round here?” he asked, having seen me exchange the usual waves of thanks with drivers who pulled over for me, or to whom I gave way.
When another driver refused to give way despite being closer to a passing place than we were, my friend was about to express his feelings in the international sign language of the angry motorist. “Best not to do that so close to home,” I advised, “as actually it is quite likely that I will know the other driver.”
He said that if he had to live in my house, he’d never leave the village at the wheel of a car.
Three decades later, meeting traffic on single-track roads doesn’t bother me, but I do prefer to have the lanes to myself, not for road rage reasons, but because when they’re deserted, there’s something other-worldly about them.
Not always in a good way: on dark, moonless nights without the familiar markers of urban streets – no streetlights or road signs, no road markings or kerbs – the lanes can be disorienting. Add thick fog, snow or torrential rain, and it can feel as if you’re heading for a Hammer Horror film set, where the undead are waiting to greet you.
But in the right light and weather, these narrow lanes can feel perfectly magical.
Earlier this year, a pleasant drive in the spring sunshine with cow parsley brushing the sides of my car gave me the idea for my new novella, Mrs Morris Changes Lanes, in which a rural journey transforms the heroine’s life by taking her to a surprising destination – and I don’t mean Chipping Sodbury Waitrose.
In my Young By Name column for this month’s Tetbury Advertiser, I wrote about a sight I’d like to spot more often in the Cotswolds – although they are beautiful enough as they are!
Driving along a lane in the high fields near Newark Park, I spot a mirage-like splash of blue big enough to fill a field. Or is it mauve? Rippling in the late afternoon breeze, the flowering crop is changing colour as readily as the two-tone tonic suits favoured by Mods in the 1960s. Oil poured on water morphs from black to rainbow hues because the floating film is just a molecule thick, but when I park alongside the field, these plants are chest high.
I’m used to seeing cars stopping on the roadside in early summer to photograph swathes of pillar-box red poppies among the crops. A few years ago, a field just off the A46 was as densely carpeted with poppies as the famous scene in The Wizard of Oz. An instant tourist attraction, it triggered a proliferation of social media selfies.
The arresting view of Hawkesbury’s poppy field caused may motorists to divert from the A46 for a closer look
The mauve flowers – or are they blue? – in this field by Newark Park have a far subtler beauty. It is of course a field of flax, the first I’ve seen for a long time, and an increasingly rare sight in the Cotswolds. How I wish I could substitute flax for the ubiquitous rapeseed, whose vivid flowers look all wrong in our gentle landscape. They also make me sneeze like one possessed, a yellow morning mist floating above their fields like mustard gas. While I don’t expect farmers to choose crops for their good looks, I do wish flax could be more profitable.
Flax, aka linseed, is certainly a useful and versatile crop. Chez Young, we add linseeds to our breakfast cereal and salads for their health benefits. Linseeds are rich in fibre, protein, Vitamin B, minerals and Omega 3 fatty acids.
I wish the latter didn’t sound so unappetising: “Mmm, fatty acids,” said Homer Simpson, never.
Research indicates that linseeds improve digestive health and lower blood pressure, bad cholesterol and cancer risk. If that’s not enough to win your heart, linseed oil goes into paints, varnishes, animal feeds and cricket bats.
The stalk, with fibres three times stronger than cotton, is the source of linen. The Ancient Egyptians considered linen a symbol of purity and allowed only priests and mummies to wear it. Much as I love linen clothes, that’s not a sacrifice I’d be prepared to make. Flax fibres are also used in the manufacture of cigarette papers (boo!) and teabags (hurrah!)
So why don’t we grow more flax on the rolling hills of the Cotswolds? When I google its preferred growing conditions, I discover it’s not just a matter of money. Flax thrives on alluvial soil, ie rich in sediment deposited by running water on a floodplain. With an average elevation of over 100m in the Cotswolds, I’m guessing alluvial soil is not our long suit.
As the sky begins to darken ahead of a thunderstorm, I realise I must make the most of this rare scene, so I capture it on my smartphone before returning to my car – and, like a tourist on my home turf, to social media.
More poppies, spotted on my way home from Newark Park
Follow the changing seasons of the Cotswolds year from one summer to the next in this seven-book series
SERIES OF GENTLE MYSTERY NOVELS INSPIRED BY THE SEASONS IN THE COTSWOLDS
Watching the changing seasons in the Cotswolds is one of the inspirations for my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries series, which follows the course of village life from one summer to the next through the eyes of newcomer Sophie Sayers.
Or ask your favourite local bookshop to order from their usual stockist, quoting ISBN 978-1911223139.
All the books in the series are available in both paperback and ebook, and Best Murder in Showis also available as an audiobook (order direct from me via this link for a very special price), and production is about to start on the audiobook of Trick or Murder?
In my Young By Name column for this month’s Tetbury Advertiser, I shared the heartwarming experience of taking my father to visit his boyhood haunts near Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire. His love of the Cotswolds from his experience as an evacuee during World War II is the reason I grew up wanting to live in the Cotswolds myself. I moved here over 30 years ago.
Here’s one way you can stop foreign travel restrictions spoiling your summer holiday this year: take a trip back in time instead. You don’t even need a time machine, HG Wells style.
Original movie poster by Reynold Brown – now in public domain, via Wikipedia.
Instead, take yourself to a place in this country that was important to you in your past. Such trips can spark treasured memories that lurk in the back of our locked-down brains, as well as providing the opportunity to create new ones.
A couple of weeks ago, I did exactly this, albeit by proxy. I took my 88-year-old father for a day trip to the Cotswold village of Todenham, near Moreton-in-Marsh.
Two days after his seventh birthday – and the outbreak of the Second World War – my father, his two sisters and their mother had been evacuated to Todenham from the London suburb of Sidcup, on the edge of Kent. They considered themselves fortunate to be able to lodge as a family with my grandmother’s stepfather and his second wife, rather than being separated and sent to strangers, as so many evacuees were.
This year (2021), on a glorious early summer’s day, together with my sister and my daughter, we toured territory that was still very familiar to my father.
The little village has not changed much in the last eighty years, at least on the outside.
The lane beside his house had barely changed at all
We enjoyed listening to my father’s recollections of his time at the village school, watching the village blacksmith at work, hunting for souvenirs from an enemy plane that crash-landed in a nearby field, and enjoying cosy family evenings playing games, reading and drawing by lamplight around the kitchen table.
View of the church from where my father’s stepgrandparents now lie at rest
When we knocked on the door of the cottage in which he had lived in those days, the current owner – whom, we were glad to see, was taking excellent care of the house and garden – was hospitable and sympathetic. Although relatively new to the village herself, she was able to share news of many people he remembered from his childhood. His friend Dorothy Duckett had become a primary school teacher, for example, and his younger sister’s friend Valerie Poole had moved away but later returned to retire to the village they all loved.
We strolled around the village, going to visit the village school (now the village hall) and the parish church which as a young evacuee he had attended every Sunday. Inside the church, an elderly lady, one of the churchwardens, was welcoming visitors.
Chatting to the churchwarden in the church he’d attended every Sunday as a boy
After a few moments of chatting to her, my father asked in sudden recognition, “Are you Valerie Poole?” Indeed she was, and together they shared memories that had lain dormant for over 80 years.
We returned from our day trip as refreshed, moved and inspired as from any foreign holiday. So if you’re wondering where to go this summer, you could do worse than visit your old haunts, wherever your roots may be.
As L P Hartley said in the famous opening line of his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country”. Best of all, there’s no compulsory quarantine when you return.
My dad with Valerie Poole – eighty years since they were last at the church together
Footnote: We’re now planning a return visit including my father’s younger sister.
The second volume includes 2016-2020
The first volume covered 2010-2015.
My father’s love of the Cotswolds inspired the watercolour painting that I used for the covers of my collections of columns for the Tetbury Advertiser.
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Order the paperbacks from Amazon via the links below or ask your local bookshop or library to order copies in for you (available from their usual stockists).
In this story, St Bride’s School acquires a secretive new pupil, Frieda Ehrlich, whose school fees are sponsored by enigmatic tycoon Sebastian Goldman-Coutts. He’s the new owner of Torrid Manor, which lies hidden behind high hedges and forbidding walls just a few miles from the school’s private grounds in the Cotswolds.
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(This post first appeared on my publisher’s blog at 
Earlier this year, a pleasant drive in the spring sunshine with cow parsley brushing the sides of my car gave me the idea for my new novella, Mrs Morris Changes Lanes, in which a rural journey transforms the heroine’s life by taking her to a surprising destination – and I don’t mean Chipping Sodbury Waitrose.
