Riverside Cottage when the river runs high in spring

Riverside Cottage is at its best in late spring, when the Coln runs full and clear after the winter rain and the swans are out on the water for most of the day. The cottage sits right on the bank, two minutes from Arlington Row, so the river is less a view from a window and more a sound you live alongside for the week.

It is a Grade II listed place, three floors of seventeenth-century stone with the steep staircase and rope handrail that age gives a house and a modern build can never fake. Couples tend to take to it quickly. It is the sort of cottage that asks you to slow down, which in May is no hardship at all.

I should be honest about the stairs, because they are part of the character and not for everyone. They are steep and they wind, the way they do in a house of this age, and the rope handrail is there for a reason. Most people find their feet by the second day and stop noticing. If you are after something flat and easy, this is not it. If you want a cottage that feels like it has been standing on this bank for three hundred years, which it has, then the stairs come with the deal and are no real hardship.

The ground floor is the warm heart of it. A well-equipped kitchen, a corner sofa, an electric fire for the cooler evenings that even May can throw up, and the doors that open out onto the terrace. It is a one-room-at-a-time sort of house rather than an open-plan one, which suits the pace of the place. You settle into a room and stay there a while.

The bath under the eaves

If the cottage has one feature people remember, it is the roll-top bath at the very top of the house, tucked under the eaves with the river below. The ceilings up there are low and the light is soft, and in late spring you can run a bath in the early evening with the window open and hear the water moving outside. It is a small thing and it is the thing most guests mention when they leave.

The wet room one floor down has a rainfall shower and a window where the swans drift past at eye level, which never quite stops being a surprise the first morning. The king bedroom looks out towards the river too, so you wake up to it whether you mean to or not.

Outside and nearby

The terrace is the place to be at the end of a warm day. It is private, set under a Japanese red Acer that is in full leaf by May, and just big enough for two chairs and a glass of something. After dinner the village empties of day visitors and you have the bank more or less to yourselves.

The Swan Inn is less than five minutes on foot if you would rather someone else cooked, and being able to walk to dinner and back along the river is one of the real pleasures of staying in the village rather than outside it. Twig and Eleven are good for a coffee or a light lunch earlier in the day. Arlington Row is the same, a two-minute stroll, close enough that you can wander over first thing before the day visitors arrive and have it almost to yourself.

There is no parking at the cottage itself, but the free public car park is a minute away, which sounds like a drawback and stops mattering the moment you have unloaded. My honest advice is to bring the car, park it, and forget about it for the week. Everything you want in the village is within a few minutes on foot, and the cottage is built for the kind of stay where the car barely moves.

The cottage welcomes a well-behaved dog too, which is rarer in the centre of Bibury than you might expect. If you travel with one, it widens the choice of holiday considerably, and a spaniel asleep in front of the electric fire after a riverside walk is very much the intended use.

Late spring is the quiet sweet spot here. The gardens are up, the Acer over the terrace is in full leaf, the evenings are long enough to use, and the village is busy by day but yours again by dusk. The river is full and lively after the winter, the swans are out, and the whole valley has that green, just-arrived feeling that does not last. If you are after a few slow days by the water with someone you like, the kind of break a lot of our London guests come for, this is the one I would point you to.