Book excerpt: With its gentle hills and timeless villages, the Cotswold countryside is a vision of natural beauty and rural calm, but it is also a region rich in history. In this new addition to the Landscapes of the Imagination series, Jane Bingham offers an intriguing portrait of the Cotswolds over the centuries, ranging from ancient stone circles and ruined Roman villas to the Cotswolds today, a picturesque destination spot popular with country-weekenders, tourists, and celebrities. Readers will visit fine churches and manor houses that have survived from the Middle Ages, and tour a landscape still bearing the scars of the Civil War. The home of kings and nobles since Saxon times, the region is famous for its elegant estates, such as Blenheim Palace--England's grandest stately home--while signs of the early industrial age can be seen in its mills and factories. Artists, musicians, and writers were also drawn to this rural paradise, from William Shakespeare and William Morris to T.S. Eliot and Ralph Vaughn Williams. Bingham captures it all in her charming portrait of this glorious spot in the heart of southern England.