Long known as the Jewel of the Cotswolds, Broadway is a village whose beauty is almost unfairly generous. A single, sweeping High Street of golden stone stretches on and on, lined with cottages, galleries and old coaching inns that look as though they have barely stirred since the seventeenth century.
The name tells you what to expect. Broadway's High Street is famously wide and long, a gentle procession of honey-coloured cottages, antique shops and tea rooms that seems to belong to an England you half-thought had disappeared. At its northern end stands The Lygon Arms, a grand sixteenth-century coaching inn where both Charles I and Oliver Cromwell are said to have slept (though never, one imagines, at the same time). In the village centre, the Gordon Russell Design Museum traces the life of the furniture maker whose Arts and Crafts workshop put Broadway on the map for a different kind of beauty. Independent galleries line the side streets, and the pace of a morning here is pleasantly, unapologetically slow.
Above the village, Broadway Tower rises from the Cotswold escarpment. Designed by James Wyatt for Lady Coventry in the late eighteenth century, this Saxon-style folly commands views over sixteen counties on a clear day. The walk up through the deer park is worth the climb alone. A short drive south brings you to Snowshill Manor, a National Trust property whose rooms overflow with the extraordinary collections of Charles Paget Wade. Broadway sits about forty minutes from Well Cottage by car, just across the county line into Worcestershire, and makes for a deeply satisfying day out.
The walled garden at Snowshill is quieter and more contemplative than the cluttered manor rooms, and the two together make a proper afternoon. Chipping Campden is fifteen minutes north of Broadway along the escarpment road and worth adding if time allows: a working market town with a magnificent medieval High Street, the Church of St James (one of the finest wool churches in England) and a pace that feels less visited than Broadway without being any less beautiful. The walk from Broadway village up to the Tower, over the escarpment and back down through the deer park, takes about an hour and a half at an easy pace and is one of the better walks in the northern Cotswolds. On a clear morning the views from the top reach Worcestershire, Warwickshire and, on the best days, as far as Wales. The return to Well Cottage in the evening light, through Moreton and across the high wolds, is itself worth looking forward to. Broadway gets busy on summer weekends; arriving on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning gives you the village at its best, before the coaches arrive and the tea rooms fill up along the High Street.
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.