The Cotswolds’ Slad Valley is famous as the idyllic setting for Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie but increasingly the area is associated with another beloved author: Dame Jilly Cooper. (Read The Field’s interview with Dame Jilly Cooper here.)

I grew up there, in the village of Bisley but, as a youngster, little did I know that Bisley and its surroundings were providing inspiration in real time for ‘Rutshire’. The fabled county is known to the millions who have devoured Cooper’s books since the 1980s, and now decades later with the hit television series Rivals. Cooper was a fellow resident and family friend who lived at the other side of the village from us at The Chantry, a gorgeous Above: Tetbury in Gloucestershire served as the primary filming location for the fictional town of Cotchester in Rivals 14th-century honey-stoned house filled with books and dogs.

Bisley is still a chocolate-box village near what was then the unfashionable side of Gloucestershire, close to the industrial valleys of Stroud. The wonderful thing about it was that there were never any tourists, and in the late 1980s there was a thriving high street consisting of two pubs – the Bear Inn and the Stirrup Cup – a restaurant and several shops. The Stirrup Cup was affectionately known as the ‘Stomach Pump’ owing to the huge quantities of alcohol that were consumed on the premises.

Tetbury in Gloucestershire served as the primary filming location for the fictional town of Cotchester in Rivals

My father, Simon, Marquess of Reading, was a keen member of the Cotswold and would regularly be seen hacking through the village on his 18hh horse, Domino. Recently, we found a photo of us all riding down Bisley High Street. It featured in the Stroud News & Journal. Our ‘hack’ was an attempt to protest and sway the incoming traffic from the new development at Bussage. Cooper and my mother appeared in another article in the early 1990s, as they were both up in arms about the building of thousands of houses and were promptly described as ‘Nimbies’. But, as the second series of Rivals hits our screens, how has being in the spotlight impacted this sleepy corner of the Cotswolds?

Author Laurie Lee in Slad village with The Woolpack in the background (1994)

Honest and untouched

Craig Fuller is a property search agent and believes it hasn’t changed much since the 1980s. “What’s great about Bisley is that it’s a secret haven and incredibly quiet. It’s located in a hidden paradise, on the edge of the Toadsmoor Valley. It feels rather frozen in time, and its narrow lanes are far less welcoming to Range Rovers than some other parts of the Cotswolds,” he says. “It is very much what people dream about. There is no Soho House or Estelle Manor vibe – just true Cotswolds countryside. “You won’t find people doing endless TikTok videos there. It is real, beautiful, quiet and honest,” Fuller continues. “Jilly Cooper’s house is a wonder, and it is clear why the southern Cotswolds and the Stroud valleys tend to attract creatives rather than those from banking and finance. There are a number of actors, artists, writers and musicians who lean this way because of the untouched countryside, which feels true to itself and free from the glamour found in some sections of the northern Cotswolds.”

Tetbury’s Chavenage House doubles as Declan O’Hara’s ‘The Priory’

Stepping back in time

The eagle-eyed will recognise Chavenage House, an Elizabethan manor house near Tetbury, as the location of Rivals’ Declan O’Hara’s ‘The Priory’. In real life it is home to Caroline Lowsley-Williams. She was overjoyed to see it appear in Disney’s Rutshire. “Having Rivals filming at Chavenage was a bit like stepping back in time to my youth. My own 21st party at Chavenage was in the mid-1980s, so seeing the house set for the New Year’s Eve party and the cast dressed just as my friends were brought it all back,” she says.

“One of the first questions the production team asked me was what my views were on sex. My answer was ‘Who with?’ I didn’t realise that in fact they were trying to ascertain if we would be happy to have some scenes of a sexual nature filmed here at Chavenage,” Lowsley-Williams reveals. “I, of course, had read the Jilly Cooper novels back in the day and knew that she enjoyed having plenty of ‘rom’ in her romcoms, though I could not remember the threesomes and foursomes.” According to Lowsley-Williams, the next question was whether she was prepared to have a camel in the house. “I was on a roll by then and said no problem at all as long as it had its own toiletry assistant (a girl with a bucket) following at all times.”

Like other locals involved, one of the highlights of the experience was having Jilly Cooper come to the filming. “It was a real pleasure having Jilly. She was thrilled to see her words come to life. She said that Chavenage was just perfect for The Priory and she remembered coming to parties such as the Cirencester Park Polo Ball,” says Lowsley-Williams.

Dame Jilly Cooper in the garden of The Chantry

Tetbury, also known as ‘Cotchester’ in Cooper’s novels, is a quiet south Cotswolds market town located close to Chavenage House. As children, my sister Natasha and I would drive through Tetbury every morning on the way to our school, Westonbirt. To a nonplussed teenager Tetbury was a fairly unremarkable place filled with shops selling bunting and mugs, pubs with smelly red carpets, and lots of antique shops. However, today, it has been sprinkled with the ‘Jilly magic’ and is now firmly awash with holiday lets and cafes: a far cry from how I remember it in the late 1990s.

Polo-playing character Ricky France- Lynch lived on a crumbling estate in Rutshire where he played on the ‘royal polo fields’. These undoubtedly point to Cirencester Park Polo Club. Custodian The Countess Bathurst points out that Cirencester is the oldest polo club in England. “Jilly would join us at the club for high days and holidays, and dispense advice to the young in a kind way,” she muses, adding: “When Jilly spoke to you, you had the feeling that you were the only person in the room.”

Writer Esther Coren notes that The Retreat wine bar in Cheltenham was ‘a dead ringer for Bar Sinister… Basil Baddingham’s pet project’. The bar is owned by Mike and Lella Dey. “We migrated from London to the Cotswolds in 1982 (the same year that Jilly and Leo did) and launched The Retreat in the decade of Riders and Rivals,” says Mike Dey, who admits he’s been told numerous times that his wine bar and its late-night fun reminds people of the fictional Bar Sinister: “Jilly Cooper novels and our wine bar epitomised the 1980s: racy, wild times in a booming era where excess and success thrived.”

Regency Cheltenham had some excellent shops in the late 1980s, such as boutique Alison Harrison where the ladies who lunch could buy a silk suit with shoulder pads and promptly collapse at The Retreat after a hard day’s shopping with a Kir royale or two. Coren also is of the opinion (one that I share) that many of Cooper’s characters would have loved the Daylesford Organic farm shop and connecting restaurant, The Trough, in Kingham. We imagine that they’d probably start the day with a juice at The Orchard Bar, work out at The Club by Bamford and even rent a Cotswold stone cottage in Daylesford Village for the weekend.

Dinner parties and pubs

However, Cooper’s own pleasures were less complicated. Roly Luard, my aunt and a close friend of Jilly’s, says: “She seemed happiest at home, and she always loved the summer months sitting outside in her garden overlooking the Cotswold valley. There was a constant stream of village friends who would pop in for a glass of champagne.” Cooper’s well-known supper parties were often catered by William’s, an up-and-coming caterer in Nailsworth. “Jilly and Leo threw a great party, whether it was a big celebration in a marquee or a cosy kitchen supper, always with her adoring dogs by her side,” Luard recalls.

Today, Anne Rainy-Brown of Really Good Food caters for the great and the good of the area, but she also provided the food for the Coopers’ ruby wedding anniversary and their daughter’s wedding. “I recall at one dinner party in Bisley, where there was royalty in attendance, I put a chocolate torte in the freezer only to find two frozen dead kittens wrapped in plastic bags,” she reveals. “I screamed and asked the housekeeper what was going on. She calmly replied that the chatelaine had put the dead kittens in there as it was too cold outside. Apparently the gardener would bury them when the ground had thawed. I was gobsmacked.”

Dinner parties going wrong feature often and famously in Cooper’s work: think the one at Green Hedges in Rivals when Rupert Campbell-Black pinches Taggie’s bottom and the moated ice-cream castle ends up in Cameron’s Armani-clad lap. Perhaps she drew inspiration from all the Bisley garden and dinner parties? Another location for such goings on is Slad Valley pub The Woolpack near Stroud. This appears in Cooper’s books, including as a meeting place for Declan O’Hara and Cameron Cook to prop up the bar. After a recent trip back to my Cotswold homeland I can report that, thank goodness, The Woolpack is just as we left it in the 1990s and continues to be frequented by locals who are still dutifully propping up the bar and were there long before the Jilly Cooper era.

Actor Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in the hit TV show Rivals

Lord Frederick Windsor, who was my childhood neighbour and grew up at Nether Lypiatt Manor nearby, remembers a local myth: “Apparently the Stroud Subscription Rooms was the only British venue where The Beatles played to fewer people on their second visit than on their first.” Jilly Cooper would have loved this sort of story where pop culture was lost on the locals. Dan Chadwick, a local sculptor who owns The Woolpack and the Juliet restaurant in Stroud where Cooper visited last year, has plenty of stories. “Jilly and Leo once had a party and we all went along and behaved very badly. Jilly was good-humoured about it and loved a bit of naughtiness. She told me that our house at the head of the Toadsmoor Valley was the inspiration for the home of Rupert Campbell-Black.

“We met at local drinks parties and also at Heather’s antique shop on Bisley High Street,” he adds. “We drank a lot of wine in the antiques shop, and for a while in the late 1980s and early 1990s it seemed the whole of Bisley were having affairs with each other – it was a subject of great delight for all of us. The full character list of her books were all around us and still are to some extent. Things have changed a bit but really it is still the same.”