Bourton-on-the-Water

Bourton-on-the-Water gets a lot of stick from visiting locals. Too many tourists, too many ice cream shops, coaches blocking the car park on a Saturday in August. All of that is true. And yet most people who live within twenty minutes of it have a soft spot for the place.

There's something about the River Windrush running alongside the High Street that never gets old. Not the famous low stone bridges specifically, though five of them, built from local Cotswold limestone between 1654 and 1911, is genuinely impressive, just the fact that there's a proper river running through the middle of a village and children are always in it. In summer the water is full of them, wellies off, trousers rolled up, completely ignoring their parents. It's one of those sights that reminds you why living in the Cotswolds is actually quite good.

The nickname 'Venice of the Cotswolds' gets rolled out in every travel piece ever written about the place, and it's earned. But what the tourist board version misses is that Bourton-on-the-Water is a proper working village of 4,000 people with a farmers' market, a local brewery, a ceramics studio, and residents who genuinely love it here, not just a pretty backdrop for Instagram.

The Model Village behind the Old New Inn is brilliant, and if you've never been as an adult you should go. A one-ninth scale replica of the village built from real Cotswold stone in the 1930s, it's now Grade II listed by English Heritage, genuinely detailed, genuinely odd, and far more interesting than it sounds in a leaflet. Birdland on Rissington Road is nine acres of gardens home to over 500 birds including penguins and flamingos, and the Cotswold Motoring Museum on the High Street houses the original Brum, yes, that Brum, alongside vintage cars and an enormous collection of memorabilia.

For food, skip anything with a laminated menu in the window and head to Bakery on the Water on Sherborne Street. Family-run, proper sourdough, riverside garden, sausage rolls that are inexplicably good. The Mousetrap Inn on Lansdowne is where people who actually live here eat, craft ales, seasonal menu, reliably excellent. Smiths on Victoria Street does the best burger in the village by some distance, using local beef and buns from Mark's Cotswolds Bakery.

If you want to escape the High Street, walk to Greystones Farm Nature Reserve, ten minutes from the centre, completely free, and on a quiet weekday almost entirely yours. Otters along the river in season, wildflower meadows, and the remains of Salmonsbury Camp, a Neolithic and Iron Age settlement that puts the village's 17th century bridges into sharp perspective.

Come on a weekday. Come in October. Get there at 9am before the coaches arrive, grab a coffee from The Den and sit by the water. That's the version of Bourton-on-the-Water that locals actually know, and it's one of the best things about living here.