Alderley

The trail through Alderley

The Cotswold Way comes down into Alderley along a sunken woodland track, drops into a narrow valley below Winner Hill, and carries on south past pasture, surviving ridge-and-furrow and a clear millstream. That is more or less the village: a fold in the hills with a church, a scatter of large old houses, and a National Trail passing through the middle of it. There is no pub here and no shop, and it is worth knowing that before you arrive with a shopping list.

What Alderley has instead is the walking. The 102-mile trail runs on towards Lower Kilcott, the Somerset Monument and Hawkesbury Upton, and if you want a loop rather than a line there are a couple close by: a Wotton-under-Edge circular in 8¼-mile and 4½-mile versions, and the Hillesley Millennium Walk, which links Hillesley, the Hawkesbury Monument, Lower Kilcott, Alderley and Wortley. The lanes in and out are unclassified and single-track; the one to Wotton-under-Edge runs about three kilometres.

Food beyond the village

For food you drive or walk to Hillesley, where The Fleece Inn stands a few minutes off the Cotswold Way. The kitchen runs to roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, roast chicken with sage-and-onion stuffing, slow-roasted pork belly, and a mushroom, cranberry and brie Wellington. There are up to six real ales at a time, with Wye Valley's Butty Bach the regular, and the pub took Dursley and District CAMRA Pub of the Year in 2018 and 2019 and the county award in 2019. Dogs are welcome in the bar, on leads, with water and treats, though not in the restaurant.

Wotton-under-Edge, three kilometres down the lane, is the practical town: an independent cinema, a seasonal outdoor pool, and somewhere to shop. Wotton Farm Shop, run by Paul and Kate Grimes, has a butchery, a deli and the Potting Shed café; its kitchen turns out an award-winning ham-and-tomato quiche and a steak-and-Guinness pie alongside soups, curries, sausage rolls and cakes. On Long Street, Relish is an independent deli and bakery.

St Kenelm and Marianne North

The church is St Kenelm's, its three-stage tower dating to about 1450, the rest rebuilt around 1802 in a Gothick manner. Inside there is a sexpartite plaster rib vault over the nave, a white-marble font of 1820, and a strong group of marble wall monuments, many to the Hale family. In the tower porch a medieval tierceron vault carries carved angels and grotesque corbels and bosses. Sir Matthew Hale, the seventeenth-century judge, was born in Alderley in 1609 and lies here.

The other name attached to the churchyard is Marianne North, the botanical painter, buried at St Kenelm's in 1890. She had spent fourteen years travelling through fifteen countries, painting plants in oils where they grew, and she gave Kew the gallery that still holds 838 of her pictures. Her last home was Mount House, at the west end of Winner Hill on a south-facing slope, where she remade a neglected garden with plants from Kew, Gertrude Jekyll and others and called it "the most perfect garden in England." The house and garden are private.

Private houses and public transport

Two other houses sit behind their walls. Alderley Grange, with a 1608 core rebuilt around 1744, was home to the diarist James Lees-Milne and his wife Alvilde from 1961 to 1975, and she rebuilt its walled gardens with early advice from Vita Sackville-West. Alderley House, a gabled Jacobethan pile of 1860, spent decades as Rose Hill School before becoming a family home again in 2009; look for the heron on its dated rainwater heads.

Getting here without a car takes planning. The nearest open station is Cam & Dursley, seven miles from Wotton, and the Robin, a book-ahead minibus, will stop at St Kenelm's on Wotton Crescent and can run you to the station. A new station at Charfield is being built and is expected to open in spring 2027.

Domesday and the millstream

The Domesday surveyors found sixteen households here, twelve acres of meadow and one mill worth ten shillings, and valued the whole place at five pounds. It was worth exactly the same twenty years earlier. The millstream the walkers follow south is still running.