SHEEP OUTNUMBER PEOPLE in New Zealand, and for centuries, that was also true in the Cotswolds, the seat of England’s wool industry. Its merchants became fabulously wealthy, building some of the loveliest manors in the country’s southwest. Their distinctive gabled roofs still peek over the high hedges that line the winding roads. It made the novelist Ian McEwan, a devotee of wild beauty, wary of the area — so many of its pastures and hedgerows had been destroyed. ‘‘What we found in our travels was that many of England’s older places had been insensitively restored, and often in the process, stripped of charm,’’ he says.

Source: New York Times August 28, 2017 09:45 UTC