The Purple Headed Mountains....

I couldn't resist stopping to take a few photo's of the gorgeous purple heather currently covering the hills that surround Sheffield.

 How beautiful it all looks.

I do love very hot summer weather, but we are heading into my favourite season.

Broadway

It was almost time to drive home, but we made time to stop off in Broadway for a walk through this chocolate box English village.

 The bottom half of the village is full of shops and tea rooms, but a walk up to the top end of the village reveals beautiful houses - where Mr Darcy would certainly come calling.

 Which one would you choose?  I'd love a look around these  - and their gardens.

 We had a little reminisce outside of this little cottage as it was the first place that hubby and I had stayed together over 24 years ago.

 We had a brilliant weekend.  One of the joys of camping is a getaway weekend like this - very low cost, and very very enjoyable.

Snowshill Manor

On Sunday morning, we packed up and headed a bit further north.  We had decided to go and visit Snowshill Manor.  We had tried to visit twice before, but it was closed both times we went.  But today we were lucky.

I thought that it had a very French feel about it.  This part of the Cotswolds is so very well kept and picture perfect.  The Manor was bought by Charles Paget Wade to house his collections of "stuff".  He collected anything that he thought was beautifully  crafted and colourful.  He didn't actually live in the Manor, he lived in the little house to the left of this picture in an equally quirky set up.

The Manor was derelict when he bought it - it is a totally amazing house to look around and you could spend literally hours browsing his stunning collections.

The story is that his gran would not let him play with toys on a Sunday, but she had a cabinet in which she displayed her collections that he was allowed to play with - he caught the bug.

There are a lot of family photographs - I thought he was a gorgeous little boy..

... and he grew to be a very eccentric old man.

The garden was stunning - it sits nestled into the hillside and really catches the sun.

I thought that the splashes of turquoise looked lovely in the garden - something I might try in my own garden.

Afterwards, we had a wander around the very pretty and fairly famous little village.

It wasn't too busy, so that was a bonus and the weather was glorious.

Tetbury and Cirencester

On the Saturday, we decided to have a short drive from our campsite to Tetbury.  Both Prince Charles and Princess Anne live only a couple of miles away from Tetbury, so I thought it might be snooty and full of over priced shops, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

 It was a gorgeous little town, full of antique and vintage shops - some a tad pricey, but other more than reasonable (and a generous amount of charity shops stocking Boden Labels and the like!!).

 The shops were really quirky and went up several storeys with great views over the higgledy piggledy rooftops.  All the shop keepers were lovely and chatty - the whole town had a great atmosphere.

 It had some great old buildings and some sweet little country hotels - I wouldn't mind staying here.  Infact I discovered that you can get guided tours around Prince Charles Garden, so I've put that on my list for the future.

 After lunch, we decided to trot off to Cirencester, but it started to rain...

 ... so we didn't get much further than the church.

What we both enjoyed about this day was visiting places that we hadn't been to before - then cosying up back at the tent to the sound of the pitter patter raindrops.