Shocking accounts have emerged from residents of “Britain’s prettiest village” who say they have been threatened by visitors – and even punched and kicked by coach drivers.

Bibury is the stunning quintessentially Cotswolds hamlet that draws in 10,000 tourists a day who come to admire the charming stone buildings, pretty waterways and a famous Instragram-able view.

The village of just under 600 people is home to the picture-postcard Arlington Row of cottages which have become a must-have social media picture for scores of tourists visiting the UK from as far away as the US, China, Japan and South Korea.

But soaring numbers arriving since Covid, combined with tiny ancient village roads not suitable for coaches and huge volumes of traffic, mean the idyllic setting has become clogged with large crowds, traffic jams and frayed tempers.

Chairman of the local parking action group, Mark Honeyball, who has lived in Bibury for 10 years, said around two weeks ago he asked a coach driver to move on from some double yellow lines before the unthinkable happened.

He told Express.co.uk “I’ve been physically attacked four times now, but once really quite badly two weeks ago, I was kicked in the chest and stomach and kneed and punched in the face full force by a driver that I’d just asked simply to move on from double yellows at the top of the village.

“The coach drivers themselves are being pushed here by their coach companies, they don’t really want to be here, they find it really difficult to park.

“The tour operators are the key behind this, the coach operators are doing what the tour operators ask them to do, primarily with people from China, India and South Korea at the moment.”

Mark explained he had reported the incident to the police but so far had not had any update on the case. Fellow resident Craig Chapman, chairman of the local parish council, said both he and his wife had been threatened.

He added: “The drivers can be very feisty, I don’t think any of them want to come here, and we don’t want them to. I think it’s a combination of the two, us getting annoyed with them, and them wishing they weren’t here in the first place – they resort to violence. It happens very often, my wife has been threatened, and I’ve been threatened.

“We acknowledge we are a beautiful village and people are going to come here, but all that we ask is that they are respectful of the local community, and quite honestly if they can’t park then the village is full.”

Bibury’s residents have united behind a plan to remove coaches from the village which features a 16th-century bridge showing damage from groaning under the weight of an astonishing 40,000 vehicles per month at peak times.

Just 14 miles away in Bourton-on-the-Water, a slightly larger village of 3,200 people, local Liberal Democrat District Councillor Jon Waering said on some occasions visitors can be “vile”.

He told how during a wet Easter weekend when two field car parks were flooded tourists “were parking in residential cul-de-sacs and they were being vile”.

He said: “A neighbour of mine was threatened with violence and property damage because he said, ‘would you mind not parking over my drive’s entrance?’

“The response was to the effect, ‘screw you, and if there is anything done to my car, I’ll know it was you, and you’ll get a brick through your window’.

“Goodness me, on the one hand we are expected to welcome visitors, but when people are behaving like that, it’s a challenge.”