Ashton under Hill

The Village and Its Pub

The Star Inn keeps eight of its twelve bar tables in the dog-friendly half, which tells you roughly who comes through the door. Ed and Vicky run it, and the food leans on a family farm at Grafton, a mile away: home-made pies, belly pork, fish pie, beer-battered fish and chips, freshly baked baguettes, and pork pies and Scotch eggs at the bar. Pie night and Sunday roast are recurring specialities. There is a 60-seat restaurant the owners call the posh bit, three changing cask ales with a weekly guest, and mature gardens holding thirty outside tables, some of them sheltered, with a play area for children up to eight.

Ashton under Hill runs along one long street at the eastern end of Bredon Hill, looking out over the Vale of Evesham. The street mixes buildings from different periods. Timber-framed and stone cottages, a fifteenth-century black-and-white farmhouse, a stone manor from before 1700, tall houses of around 1800, Victorian red brick and newer homes fill the gaps between them.

Bredon Hill and Nearby Provisions

The hill is the reason to bring boots. A seven-mile circular starts from the churchyard and climbs Bredon by way of Grafton, Conderton Hill and Shalford Farm, returning along the Wychavon Way over Great Hill. It takes about three hours, stays off-road, and the slopes can be steep. Bredon stands on its own above the vale, an outlier of the Cotswolds, with Iron Age and Roman remains and standing stones near the top. From the summit you can see the Malverns and the Cotswold Edge. Parson's Folly, the tower up there, was put up by a Mr Parsons of Kemerton in the late eighteenth century.

For provisions, Wayside Farm Shop and Tearoom at Wickhamford is a nearby option on the Evesham side. The tearoom does scones, teacakes, quiche and sandwich plates, and turns the seasons over on the specials board: bubble and squeak with bacon and a poached egg, asparagus in spring, plum dishes through the summer.

Church, Cross and Domesday

The church of St Barbara has a medieval cross outside it — three worn steps, a socket stone and shaft, and a sundial added later. The building is twelfth-century at heart, reworked in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and again around 1500. Sir John Franklin rebuilt the chancel in 1624 and left his family in the dolphins carved around the east window. Inside there is a Norman south doorway, an ornate fifteenth-century octagonal font, a seventeenth-century altar table and fragments of medieval glass. It was St Andrew's until about 1750, when it changed its dedication.

The village is old enough to sit in Domesday, where it appears in two holdings across Tibblestone hundred, twenty-seven households in all — twelve villagers, four smallholders, eight slaves and three female slaves, with twelve plough teams between them. The two holdings were valued at two pounds and thirty pounds a year.

A Rural Writer and Ways In

Its notable rural writer was Fred Archer, born on a Vale of Evesham farm in 1915. At Stanley Farm here he wrote The Distant Scene at the kitchen table; his wife Joyce typed it, his daughters Shelagh and June heard it read chapter by chapter, and Hodder & Stoughton published it in 1967. He kept on at roughly a book a year for three decades, recording a countryside changing from shire horse to tractor to combine. He set out to catch the people before they went. "I felt it would be such a pity," he wrote, "if … their sayings, customs, ways of life … should vanish with them."

Evesham station is about five miles north-east, run by GWR, with Ashchurch for Tewkesbury the alternative to the south-west. The village sits half a mile west of the A46, six miles from junction 9 of the M5, and the 540 bus runs to Evesham and Tewkesbury, though the timetable is worth checking before you rely on it. Tewkesbury itself is a short trip for the abbey; Broadway Tower, with its deer park and Cold War bunker, is another.

Sport, Orchards and Open Gardens

Cricket has been played here since 1907, and the club still runs kwik-cricket for children; there are football fields off Elmley Road. Ashton was orchard and market-garden country once, and something of that survives in the Open Gardens weekend, when people here open their plots to raise money for the church and the community centre, and you can walk from one back garden to the next along a street that has been growing things for a very long time.