Fairford is a small, quiet town on the southern edge of the Cotswolds, built of honey-coloured stone along the River Coln, and it hides one of the great treasures of English medieval art. The parish church of St Mary has the only complete set of medieval stained glass windows to survive in any parish church in England: twenty-eight windows, made around 1500, telling the story of the Christian faith from the Creation to the Last Judgement. How they survived the iconoclasm of the Reformation and the Civil War is a mystery, but they did, and they are well worth twenty minutes of your time.
The town's other claim to fame is very different. Just south of Fairford lies RAF Fairford, a base used by the United States Air Force, and every July it hosts the Royal International Air Tattoo, one of the largest military air shows in the world, when the skies fill with jets and the roads fill with traffic. Outside that week, you might still hear the occasional roar of aircraft.
The landscape around Fairford is gentle and pastoral, with water meadows, stone villages and gravel pits, many now flooded and used as lakes for sailing and fishing in the Cotswold Water Park. A few kilometres east, Lechlade is the town where the Thames becomes navigable, and its riverside meadows are made for a short break. To the north, the roads climb into the Cotswold hills, with wide views, beautiful villages and quiet lanes, and further west lie the Welsh borders and the Brecon Beacons, the destination of the day.
As a fuel stop, Fairford is small, so options are limited; Cirencester and Swindon are the nearest large towns with plenty of choice. The town has a few pubs and cafés where you can get a coffee or a quick lunch. The roads around Fairford are flat and easy, with gentle curves, but the Cotswold lanes can be narrow and winding, with blind bends and stone walls close to the road. Watch for tractors, horses and cyclists.