Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake

"A purpose-built opera house in a Cotswolds village presents Wagner, Handel, Verdi and Humperdinck across a full summer season, one of the UK's most ambitious small opera festivals in a setting of extraordinary rural beauty."

Longborough Festival Opera

"Three days at South Cerney Airfield bring together one of the largest gatherings of vintage vehicles, steam engines, working horses, buses and stationary engines in the South West, a complete world of working mechanical heritage set out across a former wartime airfield with the Cotswold Water Park shimmering beyond."

Gloucestershire Vintage and Country Extravaganza

"Vintage biplanes drone overhead while hard driving bluegrass and old time pickers jam around a bonfire on one of the quirkiest festival fields in the country."

Didmarton Bluegrass Festival

"One of the biggest one-day shows in England, held in the Cotswolds on the first Saturday of September, Shetland Pony Grand National, champion cattle, and a showground that fills the whole town with its presence."

Moreton Show

"Traction engines, vintage vehicles and working machinery gather off the A436 near Bourton-on-the-Water for a two-day show in the Cotswold limestone uplands, the kind of event that draws real working-machinery enthusiasts rather than festival-goers and is better for it."

North Cotswold Steam and Vintage Show

"The most prestigious sheepdog event in the British Isles, held at the Daylesford Estate where the finest handlers from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales compete across three days for the International Supreme title."

International Sheepdog Championship

"On Guy Fawkes Night itself, locals carry flaming tar-soaked barrels through the crowds outside Ottery St Mary's pubs in a fire custom that has been performed annually on this Devon high street for over 400 years."

Ottery St Mary Tar Barrel Rolling

"Locals shoulder flaming barrels of tar and carry them blazing through the seaside town centre in a fiery survival of an old Devon Bonfire Night custom."

Seaton Tar Barrels

"Villagers ring the church bells discordantly to scare off evil then heave a one-tonne boulder over with crowbars to keep the Devil trapped beneath for another year."

Turning the Devil's Stone

"The night before Christmas Eve, this impossibly pretty Cornish fishing village marks the legend of a man who braved winter storms alone to bring in a catch that saved the whole village from starvation, with lantern processions down harbour lanes and a vast stargazy pie whose fish heads gaze out through the pastry crust."

Tom Bawcock's Eve

"Lantern-lit crowds gather around the community orchard for an apple-blessing ceremony with Morris dancing, folk song and mulled scrumpy on a cold January night."

Stoke Gabriel Wassail

"By bonfire light a crowd toasts the oldest apple tree, fires guns to scare off evil spirits and pours cider over its roots at the Butchers Arms."

Carhampton Wassail