Stage one - Chipping Campden to Stanton and an extraordinary celebration
"Now the light falls across the open field, leaving the deep lane shuttered with branches dark in the afternoon." TS Elliot So, we had long planned to do this, but how best to go about it? The CW is nominally about 102 miles long, so clearly for us it was not going to be likely we would find a 10+ day period when we could attack it in a oner! Nevertheless, it did seem to take a long while to get ourselves organised to take it on, even in short bite-sized stages. Finally, on a whim the day came when we got under way. That day was Thursday 2nd of June 2021. I am now writing this up, six months later, so it's probably going to be a bit shorter (thank God I hear you gasp), as I try to rack my brain, with the aid of some photos, to recall the journey. The conundrum with a task like the CW is a logistical one; whether to drive to A, walk to B, then somehow repatriate the car, or the other way round, or some other method. We started the Cotswold Way by doing the above, i.e. we d