Minchinhampton and Rodborough Commons: The Cotswolds countryside where butterflies roam and stones cure smallpox

Sunset over Rodborough Common looking towards Stroud, Gloucesterhire.

(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

published 5 February 2021

These 828 acres of hills above the Stroud Valleys and Severn Vale are adorned with fluttering large blue butterflies, successfully reintroduced after 40 years of extinction in the UK, plus the rare Duke of Burgundy.

A misty day in November at Rodborough Common, Gloucestershire.

More than 100 species of grasses and wildflowers, from short-lived pasqueflowers in spring to summer bee orchids and autumn gentians, make this an internationally important site.

There’s historical significance, too, on Minchinhampton, with mile-long earthworks from the Iron Age Belgic Dobunni tribe, a long barrow named for an 18th-century preacher, Second World War glider-trap remains and a standing stone that can apparently cure smallpox. Though in the case of the latter it's probably best to rely on your local GP for all your smallpox needs...

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.