Twenty five years ago, the Cider With Rosie author talked to David Parker about his beloved Slad valley. This walk takes in his favourite views, his local pub and final resting place

‘The Woolpack is my local. It used to be, as the name suggests, a place where the pack horses from the hills, bringing the wool down to the Stroud mills, used to stop for refreshment. It’s got great character, as you can see.”

I certainly could see. Laurie Lee had invited me to his local to talk about a television programme I wanted to make about him and the ways in which this part of his world and its landscapes had shaped his writing. It was early spring 1994, and we were chatting in the bar that he reckoned had not changed all that much in generations – apart, that is, from the price of its beer. That initial meeting had led to a series of recorded conversations. Now, 25 years on and following their publication, I was going back to walk Laurie Lee’s valley.

I decided to begin my walk in The Woolpack Inn. Less than three miles north of the Cotswolds town of Stroud, it’s the only pub in Slad, the tiny village in which Laurie had spent his early years. The circular walk, at a pace appropriate to the style of the writer in whose footsteps I was walking, would take me about 2½ hours. It’s a walk you can round off with a late lunch in his local – in “his” bar, even.

The day I had chosen was bitterly cold but bright, the sky a deep blue; there had been an overnight dusting of snow. After a warming coffee in The Woolpack (it opens at midday) I set off along the road up the hill. After no more than a few hundred yards, I paused … looking down the steep slope towards the house in which Laurie spent his childhood, one understands immediately the significance to him of the physical character of this area of Gloucestershire. “Living in our valley was like broad beans in a pod,” he wrote. “All my beginnings were hatched into this very compact series of narrow, brief valleys, which are like seed pods.”

Just beyond the house I took a right fork, and leaving the busy road I followed the lane, passing some houses dating back to the 17th century. In those days this lane was the only road through the village, hugged by The Woolpack and a few houses as it followed the contours of the valley. A new road, slightly above, was built in the 1830s. Both the school Laurie attended and Holy Trinity, the church in which he sang as part of the choir, followed. The Woolpack, according to Laurie, just added a storey and turned to face the passing trade on the new road.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Laurie Lee at his cottage in Slad. Photograph: Keith Waldegrave/Rex/Shutterstock

I followed the lane as it wound its way down to the valley bottom and then took the path adjacent to the village pond. It’s a mill pond, one of a number in the area that were built to drive a series of woollen mills that once helped shape the character of the valley and its cottage industries. Most of the ponds were destroyed in a great storm in the distant past, but this one, unlike the woollen mills it once served, survived. Laurie had brought me here in 1994, to emphasise just how special it had been for him. Back in his youth it had been one of the regular haunts of the village boys and girls, as they gathered for “fun, games and secrecy. It was the centre of all our juvenile recreations, from winter skating to summer bathing.”

In spring, its banks are covered in daffodils; in summer, stargazer lilies burst through. It’s home to families of mallards, coots and dabchicks.

The pond and the dabchick were the inspiration for some of Laurie’s childhood writing. In July 1925, aged 11, he won a prize for an essay about the dabchick in a competition organised by the RSPB. In beautiful copper-plate handwriting it begins: “A dabchick or a little grebe is a waterbird. Its haunts are rivers, ponds and lakes. It is called a dabchick because it dabs and dips very well.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some of Lee’s earliest writings were inspired by Slad’s ponds and their wildlife. Photograph: Peter Llewellyn/Getty Images

In winter the pond has an altogether different feel; my only companions were a pair of mallards and an egret, peering into the dark water from the pond’s edge. As I was shivering just a little beside the cold stillness of the water, it was time to move on. I followed the path up through the field, keeping close to the hedge on my right. There’s a kissing gate in the corner at the top of the field, on the edge of a wood. I went through the gate and made my way along the valley side towards Furners Farm (now a bed and breakfast). Once through the woodland there were fine views across the valley back towards the village, bathed in warm, low, winter light.

I stopped to take a look. It was now so cold that my toes and fingers were beginning to feel numb and I could see my breath clearly. It was this intense, bone-chilling, winter weather that inspired some of Laurie’s early poetry, especially for a poem commissioned by the BBC in the early 1940s, in the depths of a freezing cold winter of war. Christmas Landscape begins:

Tonight the wind gnaws

With teeth of glass,

The jackdaw shivers

In caged branches of iron,

The stars have talons.

That’s how it felt to me as I moved on, crunching along the frosty path, past an old apple orchard. The path took me through what had once been the farmyard, then left up the lane to a crossroads. I turned right, following the road as it dropped and swept round to the tiny hamlet of Elcombe. There was smoke drifting upwards from fires burning in the hearths of cottages; the cottagers, I imagined, huddled cosily around them.

Just beyond Elcombe the path leaves the road and follows a route through the steep slopes of the Laurie Lee Wood nature reserve. This ancient woodland was once owned by Laurie and acquired by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust from his family in 2013. It’s lovely woodland at any time of the year, though spring is exceptional, as you might stroll through carpets of bluebells or clusters of the rare orchid, white helleborine. I had a robin for company.

Coming out of the wood, I turned left and followed the track as it climbed and drifted to the right. It leads to the magnificent Swift’s Hill, commanding, as Laurie put it, “the whole of the valley like a great ancestral hump”.

Around the hill I spotted the remains of small quarries where, he recalled, a quarry man from Elcombe used to pick up ragstone and limestone to repair and build any number of the drystone walls in the area. Laurie once characterised his good friend, the poet Frank Mansell, as “Cotswold as a drystone wall”. For Laurie and many others, the drystone wall is an elemental part of the Cotswolds landscape.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lee’s favourite pub, the Woolpack. Photograph: Peter Llewellyn/Getty Images

The views from the summit of Swift’s Hill, especially on a cold and clear winter afternoon, were breathtaking. Slad was easy to spot, its houses “snug, enclosed and protective” in the hillside like “peas in a pod”. To the south-west the landscape unfolded towards Stroud and, beyond, backlit by the sun, the vale of the River Severn … superb.

There is so much that is special about Swift’s Hill. It’s home to a host of rare chalk plants, including no fewer than 14 different species of orchid. There is archaeological evidence of continuous settlement on the hill dating from the stone age: that sense of continuity was as important to Laurie as the inordinate beauty of the natural landscape.

“It’s not only the trees and the stones and the houses, it’s the people,” he reckoned. “They are all equally endemic, they are rooted to this part. They are the valley, they are the Cotswolds.”

I left the hill, following the steep path down to the road, passing Knapp Farm – another nod to the important role the woollen industry played round here – and then following the footpath sign to Upper Vatch Farm. I clambered over a stile and crossed the field, enjoying the splendid views towards Swift’s Hill, the afternoon winter sun casting long shadows across the landscape. I followed the path, crossing another pond and a small apple orchard to yet another stile. Now I was retracing my route from earlier in the day, through Furners Farm and on towards the village pond.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An early winter frost in the Slad valley. Photograph: Alamy

I passed on old hay meadow on the left. This was the field where, in the height of summer haymaking, the young Laurie Lee encountered Rosie, in a scene that has become one of the best-known in 20th-century English writing.

“We did not go over there to be seduced, we went over there to be a man and to help the men with the haymaking, but there was always, well not always, a Rosie type in the grass, waiting to waylay one of we sturdy lads … I stuck my fork into the ringing ground and followed her like doom.”

That was then. On my walk there was no one waiting anywhere to waylay anyone. It was far too cold and getting colder as the sun began to disappear over the hill. I headed back more quickly now, beside the pond, up the lane and into the village. Before I reached The Woolpack I crossed the road and followed the path to the church. During our conversations in 1994, Laurie had reflected on matters of life and death.

“I’ve found a place halfway up the churchyard, near enough to the church to be aware of, in a spiritual sense, matins on Sunday morning, but also to be within reach of, in a temporal way, orgies on Saturday nights in The Woolpack. And alternating between the temporal and the spiritual is the way I wish to spend what eternity is left to me.”

He was true to his word. He died on 13 May 1997, and he’s buried in the churchyard, just as he had requested. His grave overlooks The Woolpack. Inside the church I took a moment to gaze at the window devoted to his life. It was funded by Laurie’s family and a public appeal. The beautiful stained glass panels include a map of Spain, a violin and his distinctive signature. It’s an elegant tribute to his life in the village and beyond.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A winter sunrise over the Stroud valley in winter from Swifts Hill Nature Reserve. Photograph: Peter Llewellyn/Getty Images

I stayed a little longer and looked at the small exhibition devoted to his life, then crossed the road and returned to The Woolpack. With photographs and paintings of Laurie, and a good selection of his books scattered around the bars like confetti, the pub has become almost a shrine to Slad’s most famous son.

It was 3pm; my walk had taken two and a half hours. As I sat in the bar, I could not help but reflect on my first meeting with Laurie, 25 years earlier. At one point in our conversation his thoughts turned to the history of the area. “My village, Slad, didn’t have much history,” he reflected, almost regretfully. I know what he meant. Slad was never the setting for the great battles that shaped England’s destiny, or the location of the fine houses of its kings and queens. Its history is altogether more modest. It’s woven like a tapestry through the stories of its families, its houses, its fields, its buildings and, of course these days, though he would never have admitted as much, through the life of Laurie Lee himself.

• Laurie Lee: Down in the Valley – A Writer’s Landscape, the edited conversations between Laurie Lee and David Parker, is published by Penguin Classics (£12.99 or £9.74 at Guardian Bookshop)

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