During the Christmas holidays we did our first recce of the area we are thinking of moving to.
Sidenote: We are not actually going to be moving to the country until August/September 2010, but because it is such a big move for us we wanted to find out a bit more about what we’re getting ourselves into ahead of time. And we’re going to be away the 3 months immediately before we plan to move, so we can’t do any visits then.
So yes, we went to stay with Ben and Jen and their families in Leicestershire, to avoid sitting at home listening to our noisy neighbour’s music blaring have a little holiday. One night we all went to stay with James and Zara who, as I mentioned, live[d - they've since moved] near Banbury. The next day on our way home we took the Yellow Van Tour through the area east of Banbury and the M40, starting in Kings Sutton (which is just over the border from Oxfordshire in South Northants) and heading north.
We meandered along through the villages with names we sometimes couldn’t pronounce and which we usually found something to chuckle about – Chacombe (“Chav-comb!”), Farthlinghoe, Middleton Cheney, Thorpe Mandeville and Sulgrave. We called out the good and bad points as we saw them. “Pub? Check!”, “Shop? Check!”, “Some nice old stone houses? Yup!”, “Small village (not verging on a town)? We’ll take it!” Those ones got marked with a big tick on our road map, for reference later in case we hear of a place for rent in one of these villages. After we passed-by the beautiful Canons Ashby Priory we decided to stop for hot chocolate.
I was hoping to take us to look at a house that we’d seen was up for rent in Lower Boddington but I couldn’t remember the street name. (It was still listed in February though so we checked it out on our 2nd Recce. ) Instead we carried on up to the villages on and to the north of the A361: Byfield, Charwelton, Priors Marston and the Boddingtons (Upper and Lower – no relation to the beer) some of which are in Warwickshire, others still in Northamptonshire.
What impressed us about all the villages in this area were that they were really quite pretty – lots of houses with that beautiful yellow Cotswold stone. Others were built in local ironstone. The bonus here (in Northants) is that you get this without paying the markup for being in an “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” (which the Cotswolds is, don’t you know).
Rock on.
