Southrop’s estate has topiary-studded gardens, wildflower-strewn meadows and a farm. Pull on your wellies and start walking, stopping to greet the resident pigs, sheep, geese, pheasants and hens. Then stroll by the River Leach – in early summer, you may see swans with their cygnets. Learn how to forage; cook a globetrotting range of dishes; and perfect your breads, pasta and pastries at Thyme’s superb cookery school. Classes are two-to-six hours in length. Pop to Cirencester (about an hour's drive away) on Friday to catch the weekly market and pick up some local produce to take home. Artist William Morris's country escape Kelmscott Manor is a 20-minute drive away. The house is filled with the artist's personal effects and lavish furnishings from the manor's co-owner, Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. From April to August royals and enthusiasts hoof it to the fixtures at Beaufort and Cirencester Park polo clubs. Wills, Kate and Harry have been known to attend matches, and if you’re a dab hand with a mallet, temporary membership for 15 chukkas is £250 at Beaufort, and one-to-one tuition or two-day intensive courses are offered at Cirencester. Give the hotel two days’ notice and they can fill a picnic basket with sandwiches, cakes and other goodies to take with you. Unesco-listed Blenheim Palace, the 18th-century home of the first Duke of Marlborough and Churchill’s birthplace, is a sprawling colonnaded confection of a residence atop Capability Browns’ grounds. Marvel at the palace’s grandeur, then pop into the butterfly house and solve the hedge maze. Touring the Cotswolds’ teeny villages is a must: their quintessentially British charm is rendered in golden-hued stone, intertwined with flowers, petite shops and country pubs. Bibury is perhaps the area’s most famous for good looks, Bourton-on-the-Water is known as the Little Venice of the Cotswolds, Broadway lies in a vale of the Worcestershire Hills, and Chippings Camden, Norton and Sodbury are home to gilded historic marvels.