Tetbury: Wool, Antiques and Royal Neighbours

The first time I came round the bend on the road from Cirencester and saw Tetbury's Market House rise up out of the mist, dragon weathervane and all, I actually said 'oh' out loud in the car and embarrassed my passenger.

It was a flat grey Saturday, the kind of English weather that presses everything into pewter, and there was this honey-and-grey market hall standing on its own stone legs in the middle of the road, as though it had simply refused to move for four hundred years.

I'd come to buy nothing in particular – a Cotswold town famous for antiques is a dangerous place to arrive with an empty boot and good intentions – and left, as everyone does, having bought something anyway: a small brass candlestick I didn't need, a bag of shortbread, a postcard I still haven't sent. Tetbury does that to you. It keeps working on you long after you've parked the car and told yourself you were only looking.

A wool town built on the backs of sheep

Tetbury's history goes back further than most people expect from a town best known these days for antiques and a famous neighbour. There was a monastery here as early as around 681 AD, reputedly founded by Ine, King of Wessex, on a hill that had already been fortified for centuries before that. But the town's real fortune, the one whose stones you can still touch, was built in the Middle Ages, when Tetbury became one of the Cotswolds' great markets for wool and yarn.

Sheep farmers and merchants from across the region brought their fleeces here to be weighed, graded and sold, and the money that changed hands built the wide streets, the generous stone townhouses and the church spire that still announces the town from every approach road.

Curiously, Tetbury never became a cloth-weaving town in the way that Stroud or the Golden Valley mills did, largely because it lacked the fast-running water a mill needs. It stayed a trading post rather than a manufacturing one – a place where wool passed through rather than being turned into cloth – and that distinction is why the town centre looks the way it does.

The merchants who grew rich on commission and trade poured their money into building rather than machinery, which is how a market town this size ended up with a market hall as grand as the one still standing at its centre.

That building, the Market House, is the first thing you see and the thing everyone photographs, usually without knowing quite what they're looking at. It was completed in 1655, commissioned by the Tetbury Feoffees – a charitable body set up in 1633 that still owns the building today – and it is a proper piece of showing-off dressed up as civic infrastructure: a timber frame under a stucco skin, raised on three rows of seven stone Tuscan columns so that the wool and yarn market could be held, rain or shine, underneath the upper hall.

Look up and you'll spot little dolphins worked into the decoration, and a slim bell turret with a weathervane that has watched over more Wednesday markets than anyone could count. Over the centuries the upper room has done service as a manorial courtroom, a lock-up for petty offenders, a technical school and a council chamber, and it's still where the town gathers today — the Wednesday market carries on underneath it, the Tetbury Food and Drink Festival fills it every autumn, and in 2012 it hosted the then Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, now King Charles III and Queen Camilla, for the town's Christmas lights.

Stand under those columns on a market morning, bunting snapping overhead and the town's clock ticking through the centuries above you, and it's not hard to see why the building earned its Grade I listing.

The Chipping Steps: Tetbury's oldest corner

Wander a few streets away from the Market House, into the northeast corner of the old town near the Chipping car park, and you find the quietest, oldest-feeling part of Tetbury: the Chipping Steps.

'Chipping' is simply an old English word for a market or market place – you'll find the same root in Chipping Norton and Chipping Campden further up the Cotswolds – and this steep little flight of stone steps marks what was once the edge of the medieval town, a gateway into the wool market from the surrounding countryside. In 1781 a new road, Chipping Street, was cut straight over the top of the steps, which is why they now feel almost hidden, tucked below street level and easy to miss unless you know to look for them.

What I love about this corner of Tetbury is how domestic it still feels. The steps are lined with rows of small stone cottages, many of them believed to have housed the weavers and wool-workers who served the market above, their windows painted in the soft blues and greens the Cotswolds does so well, their front gardens tumbling with roses and box hedging.

Walking the lane that runs along the top of this old quarter – cobbled, narrow, sloping hard downhill toward the valley – you get a real sense of how a medieval market town actually worked at street level: steep enough that carrying anything heavy up or down it would have been a genuine chore, which, as it turns out, is exactly the point of the town's strangest and most beloved modern tradition.

Highgrove, and the town the King shops in

You don't have to be in Tetbury for long before you notice the royal thread running through it. Highgrove House, the Georgian country residence just southwest of town, has been the private home of King Charles III since 1980, when the Duchy of Cornwall bought the estate for him as the then Prince of Wales.

He remodelled the house in the late 1980s and, since 1996, has opened its organic, deliberately wild gardens to the public on pre-booked tours running from April to mid-October – more than thirty thousand people a year walk through the wildflower meadows and the topiary he has spent four decades shaping.

The proximity shows up in the town itself in small, unpretentious ways rather than anything gaudy. There's a Highgrove Shop on the high street selling Highgrove and Duchy Originals products, with the profits going to The King's Foundation, and an Orchard Tearooms that opened its doors to the public on Tuesdays as part of a community initiative.

Union flags and bunting appear along the main streets for royal occasions with a regularity that starts to feel like local colour rather than special effort, and shopkeepers mention Highgrove the way people elsewhere might mention a well-known local employer – matter-of-factly, without much fuss. It gives Tetbury a slightly polished, well-kept air without ever tipping into pageantry; the town was already handsome long before it had a famous neighbour, and it wears the connection lightly.

Long Street and the art of the antiques hunt

If Highgrove gives Tetbury its royal footnote, antiques are what actually built its modern reputation. Long Street, running off the main crossroads by the Market House, is lined almost end to end with dealers, and the scale of some of them still catches me off guard – this is a town of roughly five thousand people with a genuinely serious concentration of decorative antiques trade.

Lorfords Antiques operates one of the country's largest collections of decorative antiques from warehouses just outside town; Brownrigg, in a handsome Georgian building on Long Street, specialises in European country-house pieces; The Decorator Source fills thousands of square feet with English, French and Italian finds, from mahogany side tables to giltwood mirrors.

It's the kind of trade that pulls in interior designers and set dressers as often as it does casual browsers, and the shop windows are curated with a confidence that tells you this isn't a token gift-shop version of 'antiques' — it's the real, slightly intimidating, thoroughly enjoyable thing.

My favourite way to spend an hour in Tetbury is simply to drift between the shopfronts without any plan to buy. I remember stopping outside Twig Ltd, on the main street near the church, and watching an elderly man in a tweed waistcoat pause mid-stride to peer through the window at a gilt console table and a pair of classical statues, the way you'd glance at a gallery rather than a shop.

That's the register the whole street operates in – half retail, half museum – and even if you leave with nothing more than a candlestick or a wicker basket from one of the smaller stalls tucked into the old market yards, you'll have had a proper look at several centuries of European taste in the space of an afternoon.

Sixty pounds of wool and a hill called Gumstool

For one Monday a year, all of that antique poise gives way to something considerably sillier and, frankly, more fun. On the Spring Bank Holiday – Whitsun Monday, in the old calendar – Tetbury holds its Woolsack Races, in which competitors haul heavy sacks of wool up and down Gumstool Hill, reportedly the steepest street in town, running between the Royal Oak pub at the bottom and the Crown at the top.

Men carry sixty-pound sacks, women thirty pounds, and teams of four take it in relay over two full up-and-down circuits, sprinting up a gradient that would be hard work empty-handed. The event has been recorded since at least the mid-1980s and now draws local rugby clubs, serving members of the British Army and mountain rescue teams among its regular entrants, all of them slipping and stumbling up a hill lined with a crowd that treats the whole thing as the best free entertainment of the year.

It's a straightforwardly daft event and I mean that as the highest praise – a direct, unbroken thread back to Tetbury's wool-trading origins, kept alive not through a museum plaque but through people voluntarily throwing themselves down a hill under sixty pounds of fleece. If you can time a visit to coincide with it, do; if not, ask in any pub on the high street and someone will happily replay their favourite Woolsack story for you, usually involving a spectacular fall on the way down.

Visiting Tetbury

Tetbury sits around a hundred miles west of London, on the southern edge of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, and it's an easy day trip or a lovely one-night stopover. By car it's a straightforward run of a little under two hours via the M4 and A429, and having your own wheels makes it much easier to combine with the surrounding villages, several of which have no rail link at all.

By train, the nearest station is Kemble, on the Great Western line out of London Paddington, from where it's a short taxi ride of around ten minutes into the centre of Tetbury; a coach from London Victoria is the cheapest option if you're not in a hurry, though it takes considerably longer. Once you're there, the town itself is compact enough to see entirely on foot – I never once needed a car once I'd parked it.

Tetbury also makes an excellent base for exploring this quieter corner of the Cotswolds, away from the coach-tour crowds of Bourton-on-the-Water or Bibury. Westonbirt, The National Arboretum, is only a few miles south down the A433 and is worth building a whole afternoon around, especially in autumn when its Japanese maples turn the whole valley red and gold, or in spring when the magnolias are out.

Malmesbury, England's oldest borough, lies a short drive further south, its hilltop abbey and riverside walks making a good contrast to Tetbury's market-town bustle. Closer still, the villages around Westonbirt and along the Avon valley are full of the kind of honey-stone cottages, rose-covered porches and quiet lanes that made me stop the car more than once just to look.

As for timing, I'd lean toward late spring or early autumn. Late May brings the Woolsack Races and gardens at their most extravagant, roses and wisteria climbing over every other doorway in town; September and October give you Westonbirt's colour and a market town that's noticeably calmer than in high summer, when the antiques shops and tearooms can fill up with visitors doing exactly what I did on my first visit – arriving with no plan and leaving with a bag full of things they didn't know they wanted.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.