Chipping Norton

Chipping Norton is the Cotswolds without the gift-shop economy, a working market town left standing, and buyers find that either a relief or a betrayal depending on how many tea towels they came for. Its vicars have form. One was hanged from his own church tower in 1549 for leading a rising, and a later one spent five years dosing the parishioners with willow bark until it became the basis of aspirin. The railway left in 1962, the tweed mill turned into flats, and the best-known farm nearby is now mostly a television programme, all of which the town has absorbed with the shrug of a place that has seen worse from its own clergy.