After the Coaches Leave: Local Secrets, Honest Stories & the Real Cotswolds

Three all, in the rain, ankle deep in the Windrush. That was Bourton on Monday, and it's the Cotswolds nobody puts on a postcard.

I'm Natalie. Not from here, and I'll say that before you check. Solihull, twenty years of Sunday day trips with a flask, then four years ago I stopped driving home. I rent, because a house here costs fourteen times what a local earns, and I've spent those four years being put straight by a neighbour called Pam who was born in Bourton in 1952 and has never once been wrong about the weather.

This is the book I wish someone had handed me on the first of those Sundays.

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It's not a village list. It's the timing rules that turn Bourton from a queue into a river with ducks on it. It's where I'd send you instead of Bibury, so you get honey stone and a bridge and nobody else, and the village lets its 627 residents breathe. It's the Slaughters named after mud, Upper Slaughter's plaque that says thank you where a memorial would be, shin kicking at the Olimpicks since 1612, the model village inside the model village, and which pubs still do a proper lunch for under fifteen quid without a tasting menu in sight.

It's the walks Pam's family have done for four generations, with the bits where you'll go wrong marked. It's an honest chapter on Clarkson country for the people who came for that and want to see the rest. And it's the moving here chapter that estate agents won't write: the second homes, the doubled council tax, why the girl who does my hair lives in Evesham, and what a good incomer actually does about it.

And the bench. Twelve minutes from Stow, one bench, the vale underneath like somebody ironed it. Exact directions. Go before the mist lifts and tell nobody.

What you get

• Around 70 pages, written by me, not a content farm
• The ten to four rule and where to go the moment the coaches arrive
• Nine villages I'd send you to instead of Bibury, with the honest reason for each
• Pam's walks, four generations of routes, with the wrong turns marked
• Proper lunch under fifteen quid, the pubs that still do it
• Clarkson country done honestly, and how to do it on a Wednesday
• The moving here chapter, second homes, doubled council tax, fourteen times salary
• Exact directions to the bench
• Free updates for life. When a pub shuts or a road gets dug up, you get the new version for nothing

Instant download after checkout, reads on any phone, tablet or laptop, and I update it every year, so the pub that shut and the road they've dug up will always be current.

Pam read it and said it was mostly right. Coming from Pam that's a five star review.

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