Gloucestershire, Somerset, Oxfordshire—the Cotswold shires. Honey-colored stone cottages huddle in valleys. Sheep once made these places rich. Their wool built the “wool churches,” vast and beautiful, standing in villages of four hundred souls. On a Sunday, the bells ring across a dozen parallel valleys. You can walk the Ridgeway , an ancient track, for a hundred miles and never lose sight of a shire’s slow, folded landscape.
The word itself— scir in Old English—meant “office” or “care.” A shire was a district looked after by a shire-reeve , a guardian of the king’s peace. Today, the reeves are gone, but the shires endure: carved by Roman roads, bounded by rivers, named for forgotten towns. shires in england
Then there’s Cambridgeshire, where the sky is enormous—a flat, silver cathedral of cloud and light. Drains and dykes keep the peat fens from swallowing the roads. In winter, mist rises from the black earth. In spring, tulip fields blaze like Dutch paintings. The shire’s people speak with a soft, singing lilt: “Over yonder—that’s the Isle of Ely. Before the drains, that was an island in a bog.” Gloucestershire, Somerset, Oxfordshire—the Cotswold shires