Chipping Campden

Chipping Campden has the loveliest high street in the Cotswolds, a long gentle curve of stone houses spanning the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, with not much in it to tell you which century you are standing in. Its wealth was wool, and its centrepiece is the Market Hall, built in 1627 by Sir Baptist Hicks for the traders selling butter and cheese and poultry, an open arcade of stone that the National Trust now keeps.

At the north end stands St James, another of the great wool churches, with the brasses and the monuments of the merchants who paid for it. Older still is Grevel House, built around 1380 for a wool man. In 1902 the designer C. R. Ashbee moved his Guild of Handicraft out of the East End of London and into the old silk mill on Sheep Street, and the town became a centre of the Arts and Crafts movement; silversmiths descended from that guild still work there.

The town is the northern end of the Cotswold Way, the hundred-mile path along the escarpment to Bath, so the boots gather here early. Up on Dover's Hill above it, a country games has been held most years since 1612.

Behind the famous street, the same rule holds as everywhere in this country. The houses with the deepest histories are the ones that say the least about themselves.