Chipping Campden is a beautiful little village, with that rich feeling of age you rarely see in America; the same rich honey-colored stone is used for many of the buildings, creating a uniformity that feels reassuring rather than bland.

It’s also very posh, with a disproportionate number of little galleries and tea shops per capita. After a nice meal in one of the local pubs (which are also rather posh, for the most part—my dinner was two starters instead of a main course; cheddar and onion fritters with sweet curry sauce and calamari and chorizo in lime and olive oil. Yum), I collapsed for the night after about a page of reading and a bit of annoyance that my WiFi wasn’t getting any signal.

The morning started with one of the other guests at the inn (which is also a pub and an Indian restaurant, though I didn’t take advantage of either of those last night) saying in a clear thickly-brogued voice while standing in the courtyard below my window, “Good morning, Cotswolds.” (Imagine a voice somewhere between Sean Connery and Groundskeeper Willy.) It turns out that also staying at the inn were a group of jocular Scottish men (I’m tempted to say they’re jock-ular, but nobody gets that Jock is slang for a Scotsman) in their late 50s, all part of a club called “Blue Flash Walking.” They’ve walked the Kerry Way in Ireland and a few other paths I wasn’t familiar with. I know all this not because I talked to them, but because at breakfast (in the dining space behind the pub that serves for the Indian restaurant but also for the breakfast room of the inn) there were five of them in matching blue T-shirts with their club name and a list by year of recent walks, with Cotswold Way 2011 at the bottom of the list in bigger letters. From their overheard conversation, I suspect they’re enthusiasts of pubs as well as walks. Will be interested to see if I run into them again, or if our days fall out of sequence. That’s the way it goes with walking; I may never see them again, or they may pop up in every pub I hit for dinner for the next week.

After a nice breakfast, it was time to get moving. I headed to the official starting point of the Cotswold way, which is marked rather simply with an sign with two arrows: one for the Cotswold Way pointing in one direction, one pointing the other for another way.

The path runs along the High Street briefly, but quickly turns up a side street that begins the fast climb up the first hill of the day to Dover’s Hill. The paved road soon becomes gravel farm road and then breaks off into a footpath. It’s smart that the path starts with a rapid gain of altitude (about 90 feet meters of altitude in 250 yards), since it’s like a warning that this is pretty much the point of this trail. It goes up, and then it goes back down. And then up again. Most of the towns are in the valleys, so I expect most mornings to begin with a climb.

When I walk alone, I tend to fall into a contemplative mood, weighing the good things and bad in my life. But the first day of walking is mostly given over to a strange mixture of euphoria and groaning, as I realize that I’ll be doing this for a while. Today was like that. The hills can be punishing in their steady rise, but then I hit the top, and these views open out before me.

Once the path hits Dover’s Hill, it stays near the tops of hills for about six miles. I hit a bit of drizzle, nothing awful, but enough that I put on my rain jacket. If the forecasts are right, that will be far from the last time I use it.

After passing a working quarry and some ridiculously scenic hills, the path arrives at Broadway Tower, which looks a bit Medieval at first glance, but is obviously of later design.

It’s an early 19th century folly built to take in views from a very high hill (the top floor of the tower claims to be the highest point in the Cotswolds (not the highest land—the base of the tower is at 314 feet meters, while Cleeve Hill is at 317 meters, but the tower itself rises another forty or so feet). I stopped in to do a bit of tourism. Each floor of the tower has an exhibit, including one on William Morris, who used to live nearby and visit here with friends.

Then the path rapidly descends into the town of Broadway, in which scenic-ness has given way to well-heeled tourism, with even more galleries and antique shops and gift shops than Chipping Campden. I walked on, untempted by the prospect of buying an expensive landscape painting or some fine china.

And then, after leaving the village and getting back to the heart of the walking—through fields pastures and woods—more hill-climbing. It really is a storybook landscape, with hills the roll gently up and down. Not sublime in the old artistic sense (no deep awe at nature’s wild will, no surrender to deep thought), but beautiful and rustic. The farm fields may be big on a human scale, but not massive like the ones you see in much of the United States now. And there’s something comforting about a farm on a hillside, with crops planted or sheep grazing on a slope.

I also encountered my fair share of sheep. You’ll be hearing more about them as the journey continues (it’s inevitable; there’s a lot of sheep along the national trails, so to not mention them would be bizarre), but here let me just pause to nod to one rebel sheep, who, if she lived in a big city, would no doubt have tattoos and some wild piercings. Is that “B.B.” like “bad to the bone?”

In the last stretch of my walk, down again from a long ridge top into the village of Stanton, I somehow missed a turning, and ended walking down a public footpath that runs parallel to the Cotswold Way about fifty yards away. I suspected I’d gone wrong when a sign said “Public Footpath” but not “Cotswold Way.” Fortunately, I worked this out on the topographical map and saw that I would simply enter the village at a different point. Perfect. I was a bit too early to check in (no one answered the bell, and my walk instructions had said check-in was after 3pm), so I killed an hour seeing the village church and checking to see that, good news, I do have WiFi here. Yay. At 3pm, I checked back at the B&B, to find that my considerate hostess has made me a dinner reservation at the only restaurant (in fact the only business of any kind, other than B&Bs) in Stanton. After posting this, I’ll have a nice dinner and, I suspect, sleep the contented sleep of one who has begun a large project, and begun it well.

Miles walked: 10