England #17 - the Slaughters & Stow-on-the-Wold at last; in The England Chronicles - September 2024

(Monday September 16 2025)

Although the Slaughters sound quite gruesome, “slaughter” just means “muddy place” in Old English. Well, now I’m looking at Lower Slaughter’s Wikipedia page, it says the name derives from the old English “slough”, which means “wet land”. As an aside, Slough House is an extremely good British spy novel series by Mick Herron which was turned into the also extremely good Slow Horses TV series on Apple (“slow horses” being an insulting nickname for the Slough House agents), and both the novels and the tv series are VERY gruesome, so there’s a peculiar connection for you!

Upper and Lower Slaughter are gorgeous villages, and weren’t even muddy, let alone horrifying. It was just a couple of miles to drive from Bourton-on-the-Water to Upper Slaughter, and there are walking trails between them all. I should really call this entry Lower Slaughter, though, since we only drove through Upper Slaughter and didn’t get any pictures. Upper Slaughter was full of pretty gold stone buildings and an old church but we didn’t see any central area with shops or anywhere to park and walk around so kept going to Lower Slaughter, which is only mile away. In keeping with all of England’s amazing history, it’s been occupied for over 1000 years and is in the Domesday Book as Sclostre.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the pictures there were actually quite a lot visitors as it’s another touristy Cotswolds destination. But oddly it didn’t seem at all crowded other than when we tried to find parking along the street and were grateful for the teeny car and the helpful guy who alerted me that I was parked inside no-parking lines on my first attempt. Now I’ve forgotten what they even looked like but they were faint lines running along beside the sidewalk which I hadn’t even noticed.

There was lots of walking around to be done in Lower Slaughter. The Eye River runs through it, and it has stone bridges like Burton-on-the-Water although not as many. 

There’s an old mill which has been turned into a shop and cafe, but sadly it was closed for renovations. 

Lots of old stone! I would love to know the ages of the houses there. 

Me standing on one of the little bridges, looking much less perplexed. 

I would love to do the walks between the villages. Next time!  The Monarch’s Way is a 625 mile footpath that follows King Charles II’s escape route after being defeated at the Battle of Worcester in 1651. I didn’t realize that until I just looked it up. The Wardens Way is a tad shorter - 13 miles - and goes to Bourton-on-the-Water. We walked along it for a little way and enjoyed the sights.

After exploring Lower Slaughter we were getting hungry so drove on to Stow-on-the-Wold. It’s yet another lovely market town and is just a few miles from Upper Slaughter. Sadly we really didn’t see a lot of it - just the main square. It was getting late in the day and we thought we’d go back…but never did. Darned time constraints! We walked around a little bit and had dinner at The King’s Arms. I had fish and chips which were delicious, although I did note in my travel journal that it was my THIRD meal of fish and chips, and I might possibly have had enough fish and chips, as much as I love them. And I also had a pint of John Smith’s bitter. Yum!

 And then it was finally home to the Chedworth Airbnb, after this very long day. I believe the next entry will be walks around Chedworth. We did several evening walks, and on this particular evening I took quite a long walk by myself. And had to use Find My Friend to locate Kim and the Airbnb when I found myself confused and potentially lost in this quite small village as darkness fell 🤣