In the charming region of Cotswolds, in central South West England

 The Cotswolds have gone from bucolic fantasy to billionaire's playground, pulling in an increasingly glitzy crowd.

=======================================================================
(Along the rolling countryside of southern England) Known because of the honey-colored stone used to build its villages, the Cotswolds offers visitors a great English experience. The area spans five counties and boasts some of England’s most impressive country houses, castles, and landscapes. Many local pubs also make it easy to experience authentic English hospitality.

+ Undulating across six counties, the Cotswolds region is a tangle of villages, thatched cottages, churches and mansions. In 1966 it was designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, surpassed for size in England by the Lake District alone. The Cotswolds, a ridge of limestone hills extending across south-central England, are part of the Jurassic uplands that cross the country from southwest to northeast. The Cotswolds escarpment rises from the clay vale of the lower River Severn and its tributary, the Upper Avon, and slopes eastward toward the clay vale of Oxford. Its crest is generally 600 to 700 feet (180 to 210 meters) high but reaches 330 meters in Cleeve Cloud above Cheltenham. The oolitic limestones provide fine building stone, which is much in evidence in the district. (In the Middle Ages the Cotswolds were open sheep runs.) The wealth obtained from the sale of wool and later from the domestic cloth industry is evident in the buildings, especially the churches that grace the villages and market towns.

+ The Cotswolds'a region along a range of rolling hills that rise from the meadows of the upper River Thames to an escarpment above the Severn Valley and the Vale of Evesham that is quarried for the gold-colored Cotswold stone. It lies across the boundaries of several English counties; mainly Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, and parts of Wiltshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, and Warwickshire. A large area in the Cotswolds has been designated as a National Landscape since 1966. The designation covers 787 square miles (2,038 sq. km), with boundaries roughly 25 miles (40 km) across and 90 miles (140 km) long, stretching southwest from just south of Stratford-upon-Avon to just south of Bath, making it the largest National Landscape area and England's third-largest protected landscape.

+ During the Middle Ages, the Cotswolds became prosperous from the wool trade with the continent, with much of the money made from wool directed towards the building of churches. The affluent area in the 21st century attracted wealthy Londoners and others who own second homes here or have chosen to retire to the Cotswolds.