Dover's Hill is a natural amphitheatre which hosted the celebrated annual Cotswold Games established by Robert Dover, an attorney of Barton-on-the-Heath in Warwichshire, in 1604. The hill, enclosed at the bottom, contains a mixture of fine green grassland and woodland and is the site of an ancient Roman vineyard.
In A Footpath-Way in Gloucestershire, Algernon Gissing describes walking a mile up the lane from Campden and joining the Cotswold Way along the ridge. From here he describes enjoying open pastures for a quarter of a mile and the view of Weston and Aston Subedge, at an abrupt drop of a few hundred feet, nestling in trees below. 'Few spots', Gissing imagines, 'can lend themselves more completely to such a display tha this at the very heart of England. For miles and miles in every direction you see pure and spotless landscape, bounded by blue and mystic hills giving just that touch of romance to which the soft luxuriant foreground does not pretend. Under those wonderful clouds which a north-west breeze alone knows how to carve, glistening on a purity of blue which its breath alone can command, you are caught in a torrent of skylarks' song which seems to fall on every sense quite as fully as on the ear. I believe one who knew Wordsworth personally considered his ear to have been his strongest sense, and one can readily accept that. For to what else is not the ear the key? And more particularly amidst that sublime silence in which Wordsworth habitually dwelt.' (pp. 103-4)
Gissing, describing how at this point the land falls gradually to Stratford-on-Avon and more irregularly east to Stour, conjectures that Shakespeare must have walked more than once that road around Malvern and Mickleton on his way to the Cotswold Games. ,