Amy Laughinghouse Hits the Road

The English Cotswolds: Ready for their Close-Up

Broadway Village

Honey-hued villages. Historic old mansions. Towering cathedral spires, and woolly white sheep grazing in green fields or upon snow-dusted slopes, a terrestrial reflection of cotton candy clouds suspended in a cerulean sky.

The bucolic beauty of the English Cotswolds are so improbably alluring at any time of year, they might have been built on a Hollywood backlot. It’s hardly surprising, then, that filmmakers flock to this photogenic swathe of twee stone towns. The region dips and rolls across south central England, encompassing Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire as it unfurls over 90 miles from south of Stratford-upon-Avon to just south of Bath.

Foxglove in the fields of Nether Westcote

COTSWOLDS FILM AND TELEVISION CREDITS

Oxford is the main setting for the British crime mystery drama “Inspector Morse,” and its two spin-off series, “Inspector Lewis” and “Endeavor.” The nearby village of Bampton doubled as Downton, where the Grantham family’s triumphs and tragedies played out over six seasons on “Downton Abbey,” and Winston Churchill’s ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, appeared in The Young Victoria and Disney’s 2015 remake of Cinderella. 

All Souls College in Oxford, England

Chavenage House featured in “Poldark” as well as the superb “Wolf Hall,” which also guest-starred Berkeley Castle and Gloucester Cathedral.

Gloucester Cathedral. Courtesy Visit Britain.

In fact, Gloucester Cathedral has appeared in so many productions, including the Harry Potter franchise, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and “Sherlock,” that I expect it’s now demanding its own dressing room complete with an albino monkey named Gary, two dozen rare orchids gathered by Tibetan monks under the light of a blood moon, and a hypoallergenic solid-gold toilet that flushes pure Evian.

That list barely scratches the celluloid surface of the Cotswolds’ impressive reel of credits.

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