The Cotswolds is now firmly established as a place of beauty, with its rolling hills and picturesque villages. But when Shakespeare’s Earl of Northumberland had to travel across it, he complained of being wearied by its “high, wild hills and rough uneven ways”. And in the 19th century, William Cobbett declared: “Anything so ugly I have never seen before.”

Oxford writer Jane Bingham has experienced both the romance and the desolation, but when she was asked to write a cultural history of the Cotswolds, she jumped at the chance.

She has known the area since 1976, when she moved to the village of Stonesfield as a newly-married 24-year-old — and discovered that the romance of a honeysuckle-covered stone cottage soon fades in the bleak winter.

In the intervening years, starting by writing for The Oxford Times magazine Limited Edition, she forged a career as an author, first specialising in heritage and art history, and more recently producing many history books for children.

She has spent two years researching her latest book, part of Oxford publisher James Ferguson's Landscapes of the Imagination series, which looks at real, mythic and imagined landscapes through their history, literature and art.

You may think there is little more to be said about the Cotswolds, but Jane has uncovered countless hidden gems — St Kenelm’s Well, near Winchcombe; the neglected and overgrown remains of a Roman villa hidden in Spoonley Wood; a Saxon nave at Duntisbourne Rouse. We all remember Adlestrop, but did you know Jane Austen stayed there, visiting her uncle?

Jane said: “I jumped at the chance to write this book, because it combined literature, art history, and my love of nosing around in churches. I saw it as a chance to get to know the area better. I knew the Oxfordshire Cotswolds pretty well, but I really loved exploring the western edge — Owlpen Manor, Woodchester Manor and Selsey Church, near Stroud. I made some interesting discoveries. I knew Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, and William Morris’s arts and crafts movement, but I didn’t realise that the painter Stanley Spencer, who is so strongly associated with Cookham, also spent time in Leonard Stanley, near Stroud. TS Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton is based on a Cotswold manor and he was baptised at Finstock.”

For Jane, the real challenge was to put aside her own feelings about the Cotswolds, and view it as others have. “I tried to see the Cotswolds through the eyes of the artists and writers and painters who lived there.

“So I walked from Painswick to Birdlip thinking of the poetry of Ivor Gurney. I visited Broadway Tower and imagined William Morris taking a bath on the roof with the wind blowing the soap around.”

“The more I researched, the more I discovered fascinating literary connections.”

She says our ‘picture postcard’ view of the Cotswolds is a romantic construct, which didn’t exist before the late 19th century.

“Before that, the Cotswolds were thought of as bare countryside, which people struggled to cross. In the 1830s, the Rev Sydney Smith said he was ‘ready to die’ after a nightmare journey across the wolds.

“Then William Morris discovered Kelmscott and created the myth of an idyllic, peaceful place, apart from the modern world. He spawned a generation of writers and artists who wrote whimsically about the Cotswolds.”

Later came eccentrics like Charles Paget Wade, who amassed a weird collection at Snowshill Manor, and the Mitford sisters, who grew up at Swinbrook, near Burford. And designers and gardeners created their own landscapes in the valleys.

Jane is also interested in the other side of the Cotswolds. “There is an alternative picture, of people starving when the mills were closing down because of competition from bigger mills in Lancashire and the Colonies. Many people emigrated or went into the workhouse.”

The industrial history includes Sapperton canal tunnel, the longest in Britain, and Box railway tunnel, which cost more than 200 lives — and the Battle of Mickleton Tunnel, where the engineer Brunel assembled a squad of 300 navvies to challenge a recalcitrant contractor.

But what Jane calls ‘Cotswold noir’ seems unlikely to shift our enduring love affair with rural England. And for the time being she will have to turn her back on the country idyll and return to her bread and butter — explaining the Tudors and Anglo-Saxons to eight to ten-year-olds.

* The Cotswolds: Landscape of the Imagination is published by Signal at £12.