“There's a treehouse bar in the woods and nobody seems to think this is unusual.”

The train from London Paddington to Moreton-in-Marsh takes about an hour and forty minutes, and somewhere around the Oxfordshire border the phone signal gives up and the hedgerows take over. By the time you're in the taxi climbing the hill out of Broadway — a village so photogenic it seems to be performing — you've already started breathing differently. The driver mentions something about a farm shop on the high street that does good sausage rolls. He says this the way locals say things that are actually important: casually, as if it's nothing. The Farncombe Estate sits above the village, spread across 400 acres of Cotswolds hillside, and The Fish Hotel is the younger, more relaxed sibling of the grander Dormy House next door. You don't arrive at a reception desk so much as wander into a lounge that smells like woodsmoke and someone else's Sunday.

The approach matters here because The Fish doesn't announce itself. There's no gate, no fountain, no uniformed figure waiting to take your bag with a performative bow. The gravel crunches. A few chickens are doing their thing near the garden. A couple in wellies walks past carrying what appears to be a bottle of wine and a board game. The building itself is honey-coloured Cotswold stone — because everything within a thirty-mile radius is honey-coloured Cotswold stone — but the interiors lean playful. Vintage fishing rods on the walls. A neon sign or two. It's a country hotel that doesn't take itself too seriously, which in this part of England is practically revolutionary.

Sleeping in the trees, sort of

The rooms range from standard hotel doubles in the main building to standalone treehouses and huts scattered through the grounds. The treehouses are the draw — elevated wooden pods with floor-to-ceiling windows, freestanding copper bathtubs, and the kind of silence that makes you suddenly aware of your own heartbeat. You wake up to a view of nothing but green. No road. No rooftop. Just oak and beech and a sky that's doing something complicated with clouds. The bed is enormous and low, dressed in linen that feels expensive without trying to prove it. There's underfloor heating, which you'll be grateful for because Cotswolds mornings in anything other than July will remind you that England is, fundamentally, a cold country.

The shower is good — properly hot, properly pressured — but the real move is the bathtub by the window. You fill it, you get in, you stare at trees. That's the entire activity. I tried to read a book in there and gave up after two pages because looking at nothing turned out to be more interesting. The Wi-Fi reaches the treehouses but it's patchy, which the hotel probably considers a feature rather than a bug. They might be right.

Back at the main building, Hook restaurant does a seasonal menu that leans on local suppliers — Cotswold lamb, Evesham asparagus when it's in season, bread that arrives warm and disappears fast. The bar area has deep sofas and a fireplace that earns its keep from October to April. But the strangest and best thing on the estate is the treehouse bar tucked into the woods: a timber platform with fairy lights, a cocktail menu, and an atmosphere that feels like a very civilised fever dream. You sit among branches drinking a gin and tonic and nobody blinks. A man next to me was reading the Financial Times up there. In a tree.

“The Cotswolds trick is that nothing happens, and then you realise that was the point all along.”

Broadway itself is a ten-minute drive or a solid walk downhill — pleasant going, less fun returning. The village is all antique shops, tea rooms, and the kind of stone cottages that make American tourists audibly gasp. Broadway Tower, a folly on the hilltop, is worth the climb for views across three counties on a clear day. The walk from the estate through the fields takes about forty minutes and passes through farmland where sheep regard you with total indifference. For food in the village, Russell's does a reliable lunch, and the Broadway Deli on the high street sells cheese that you'll regret not buying more of.

One honest note: the estate is big enough that getting between things — your room, the restaurant, the bar, the spa — involves actual walking, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in the rain. They provide torches. You will need them. The paths are unlit and the Cotswolds dark is a proper dark, the kind city people have forgotten exists. It's part of the charm, but pack shoes you don't mind getting muddy.

Walking out into the wool towns

On the last morning, I walked down through the estate grounds before breakfast. The light was doing that low English thing where everything looks like a painting someone would hang above a fireplace. Two rabbits froze on the path and then bolted. Somewhere behind the trees, a woodpecker was at work. Broadway was just waking up below — a delivery van outside the bakery, a dog walker on the green, the tower catching the first proper sun.

If you're heading south afterward, the drive through Stanton and Stanway is better than the main road — slower, narrower, and lined with the kind of villages that don't have a single chain shop. The 606 bus connects Broadway to Moreton-in-Marsh station, but check the timetable; it runs with the confidence of something that knows it doesn't have to try very hard.

Rooms at The Fish start around $237 a night for a standard double; the treehouses run from $475. For that, you get the estate, the quiet, the treehouse bar, and the particular Cotswolds talent for making you forget you had anywhere else to be.