On the small green in the middle of Acton Turville stands a canopied well, built over what is said to have been a Saxon sanctuary. It is a good place to get your bearings: Cotswold stone, steeply pitched stone-slate roofs, boundary walls and gate piers, and then the open fields of the Cotswold plateau starting more or less where the houses stop. The Wiltshire border is close, and Badminton is about two miles north.
The Fox & Hounds is the pub, and it earns its keep. It was a coaching inn once, putting up travellers and stabling their horses on the road towards the medieval market at Chipping Sodbury, and it still keeps rooms: four en-suite bedrooms above the bar and dining rooms. The Badminton Estate took it over and reopened it in April 2026, with the Duke of Beaufort pouring the first pint. The kitchen runs to seasonal, locally sourced food, and recent diners praised the Sunday roast. One recent diner, Lucinda, described "lovely atmosphere and friendly staff." Dogs are welcome, and there is a garden courtyard for the weather that allows it. Local ales are advertised.
The same estate reopening brought back the village shop and Post Office at 7 Tormarton Road, which covers the essentials: the counter for postal business, cash withdrawals and deposits, bill payments and top-ups.
St Mary's stands a little behind the houses, reached by a public right of way that runs through mature trees. The core of the church is 12th century, with 13th- and 15th-century alterations, though a good deal of what you see is the work of T. H. Wyatt, who restored and partly rebuilt it in 1853, added the north aisle and vestry, and took down the central tower. The bell turret that had sat on that tower, spirelet and cylindrical pinnacles and all, was moved to the east gable of the nave. Inside there is an Early English chancel arch, a plain circular Romanesque font, and a south doorway with dog-tooth moulding framing an inserted 14th-century image niche.
The turnpike past turns up again at Pike Cottage, an early-19th-century tollhouse built half-hexagonal to face the road. The tollboard is long gone; the clock that hung above it is still there. The village has a habit of keeping the useful part of a thing after the rest has vanished.
It is old enough to sit in the Domesday Book, where it appears as land held by Arnulf of Hesdin: seven households, four villagers and three smallholders, fifteen acres of meadow, valued at five pounds. It had been worth the same five pounds twenty years earlier. Farming carried the place for centuries afterwards, and Church Farm and Hollybush Farm are still among its more prominent buildings.
The walking is mostly next door, on the Badminton Estate. A level two-and-a-half-mile circular runs from Badminton village hall past the paddocks, Park Pond and the horse-trials arena, with the Fox & Hounds a mile off the route; a longer five-mile loop takes in Seven Mile Plantation and Little Badminton, though it is worth checking the route is open before setting out. The park path closes during the Badminton Horse Trials, so plan around it. Further afield, there is Castle Combe, with its wooded valley of honey-coloured cottages, and Dyrham Park's baroque house and deer park near the A46. In the village itself there is a tennis club with a community court on Littleton Drew Lane, where you can pay to play by the hour or take a session with an LTA coach.
Getting here is straightforward. M4 Junction 18 is about five minutes away by the A46 and B4040, the nearest railhead is Yate, roughly seven or eight miles west, and the Coachstyle 41 stops at the Fox & Hounds on its run between Malmesbury and Chipping Sodbury.
On a good evening the pub's garden courtyard tends to fill up, dogs and all, while the rest of the village settles into quiet around the well on the green.
