Painswick

Painswick calls itself the Queen of the Cotswolds, which is a bold claim in an area full of villages that think very highly of themselves, but it's not entirely unearned. The town sits on a hill with views across the Slad Valley, the streets are steep and winding, and almost every building is Grade I or Grade II listed. It's smaller and quieter than Stow or Chipping Campden, which means it gets overlooked by the coach tour crowd, which is entirely to its advantage.

St Mary's Church is what people come to see, a 14th-century wool church famous for its churchyard full of 99 yew trees. Local legend says the devil won't allow a hundredth tree to grow, which is nonsense, but the truth is almost as odd: the trees were planted in 1792 in a very specific arrangement and have been maintained that way ever since. The churchyard also hosts the Clipping Ceremony every September, where children hold hands and circle the church singing hymns, a tradition that dates back centuries and is exactly as charming and slightly eerie as it sounds.

The town made its money from wool in the Middle Ages, then shifted to mills powered by the streams running through the valley. A lot of the old mill buildings are still standing, converted into houses now, and the network of footpaths through the valley follows the old packhorse routes used to move cloth.

Painswick Rococo Garden just outside town is one of the best gardens in the Cotswolds and criminally undervisited. It's an 18th-century pleasure garden that was lost for decades, rediscovered in the 1980s, and restored to its original design, winding paths, follies, a kitchen garden, snowdrops in February that people drive from Birmingham to see. It's beautiful, slightly eccentric, and never as busy as it should be.

For food, the Falcon Inn on New Street is the one locals go to, proper pub, open fires, decent beer, good-value food. The Royal Oak does Sunday roasts that are reliably excellent. Painswick Golf Club's clubhouse restaurant is open to non-members and has some of the best views in the area if you don't mind the golfers.

The town has a surprising number of independent shops for its size, delis, antiques, a very good butcher, a bookshop. It feels like a place that still functions as an actual town rather than a museum village, which is rarer than you'd think round here.

The Cotswold Way passes through Painswick, so if you're walking any section of it you'll end up here at some point. The stretch between Painswick and Coopers Hill is one of the best bits with open hilltops, beech woods and views for miles.

Come in late winter for the snowdrops at the Rococo Garden, or in autumn when the beech woods around the town turn. Avoid the annual Painswick Feast in September unless you actively want to be in the middle of a street fair.