Alderton

A Thatched Inn and a Village Store

The Gardeners Arms is a 16th-century thatched inn, and since February 2026 the kitchen behind its low windows has been Nepalese and Indian. It trades now as The Gurkhas at Gardeners Arms, and the menu is worth arriving hungry for: handmade vegetable momo with a tomato-and-sesame dipping sauce, chicken choila, salmon tikka, sea-bass fish pakora, king-prawn shaslik, cauliflower Manchurian, paneer 65 and daal fry, plus a Gurkha Grill and a sizzler salad for the undecided. The chefs bring more than twenty years across Indian, Nepalese and Western cooking, which is a lot of experience to find under one thatched roof in a village this small.

On Blacksmiths Road, the Alderton Village Store and Post Office does the everyday work. There is fresh bread, French bread and pastries, Cotswold free-range eggs, local organic honey and vegetables, deli goods, Gloucester Old Spot bacon and ham, and local cheeses. That is most of a breakfast and half a picnic in one stop.

Hills, Paths and a Medieval Church

Alderton sits in the valley between Alderton Hill and Dixton Hill, on the north-west edge of the Cotswolds. It is not all honey-coloured stone; the older core mixes Cotswold stone with red brick, and the timber-framed, thatched houses cluster around Church Road. The hills are the point of coming here. A 5.5-mile circular devised by the Cotswold Voluntary Wardens starts from the Gardeners Arms and loops around Dumbleton Hill, mostly through farmland, with views west to Bredon Hill and the Malverns. It takes about three hours, has some steep pulls, and wants a reasonable pair of legs. The waymarked Winchcombe Way also passes through, dropping from Langley Hill through Gretton before skirting Dumbleton Hill.

The Church of St Margaret of Antioch is Perpendicular, Grade II*, with a 14th-century south aisle and a three-stage tower, thoroughly restored in the early 1890s. Inside there is a 12th-century limestone font, a long medieval chest with decorative ironwork, an east window of 1928 by Geoffrey Webb, and a white-marble monument to the Reverend Henry Higford, who died in 1795. A damaged early font bowl sits in the porch, and fragments of 12th-century carved stone survive from an older building on the site. The parish began as a pre-Conquest chapel tied to Winchcombe and did not win the right to bury its own dead until 1379.

Wells, Drovers and Alderton with Dixton

Domesday recorded the place as Aldritone, its land split between the Crown and Winchcombe Abbey. The village grew up on a patch of sand among otherwise clay soils, which meant reliable wells; a village pump stood in Cambridge Square in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Alderton also lay on a drovers' route running from Hereford and Worcester towards London, and the old livestock pound stood near the pub, where cattle are said to have rested overnight. A 1710 snapshot of the village lists two innkeepers, a tailor/weaver, two blacksmiths, a cordwainer, and a stonemason who doubled as wheelwright.

In 1500 this was two hamlets, Brentyard to the east and Polysend to the west, and the parish went by the name Alderton with Dixton until 1831. Dixton Manor, out in the wider parish, was built in 1555 by John Higford, whose porch datestone still records the year; it keeps an Elizabethan staircase and a Tudor-arched stone fireplace. Church Cottage, beside the churchyard, is a thatched 17th-century house that was home to the diarist Bertha Nind, who set down her account of village life as The Diary of an Alderton Girl. A railway was proposed in 1860 to run from Toddington through Alderton to Beckford, and did not materialise after an objection involving the Earl of Wemyss and March's land.

Playing Field and Practical Connections

Families are well served. The playing field has a pavilion, allotments and a playground improved in 2018 with climbing towers, a fireman's pole, a double-width slide and a roundabout. The village year takes in the Alderton 5k for the Acorns Pre-School and a produce-and-craft show.

Getting here is straightforward: the M5 is close, Winchcombe four miles off with Sudeley Castle beyond it, and Ashchurch for Tewkesbury the nearest station, with Pulhams' 656 bus linking the village to Winchcombe and Bishop's Cleeve.

Eighty Houses, Forty Wells

Eric Eaton, born in the village in 1912, opened a verse about the place he knew: "Eighty houses, forty wells, / A dozen ponds, six lovely bells."