The Cotswolds

The Cotswolds isn't a place but a belt of low hills scattered with villages built from the same honey-coloured limestone. The problem is that those villages connect to the towns on the edge of the region rather than to each other. So you plan it backwards: transport and the last bus first, then the list of what you'd like to see.

Two lines come out of London Paddington. The Cotswold Line runs to Charlbury, Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh, about an hour and thirty-five minutes out; the Golden Valley Line goes to Kemble and Stroud. Moreton is the only real base, because you step off the platform straight onto a bus. Route 801 links Cheltenham, Bourton-on-the-Water, Stow-on-the-Wold and Moreton roughly hourly and runs on Sundays too, though the last departures come much earlier.

Bibury is the hard piece of the puzzle: one bus, the 855, from Bourton via Northleach, Monday to Saturday, with the last one out of Bourton around five in the afternoon. On Sundays there is nothing at all. Castle Combe sits in a different corner entirely and is reached from Bath — eleven minutes by train to Chippenham, then twenty on the bus, four or five departures a day. Neither village forgives a missed connection.

If you have no car and no appetite for two days of timetables, a day tour from London handles four villages at once: out in the morning, about nine and a half hours, roughly £90 a head in a minibus. The same thing runs from Bath, shorter. It isn't cheaper than doing it yourself, but it is the only way to see more than two places in a single day without your own wheels.