Asthall

Garden cooking and the ridge pub

In the walled garden of the Three Horseshoes, a converted horsebox serves as a pizza kitchen, on a terrace that looks over the Windrush Valley. The pub is an ingredient-led inn with six rooms, and much of its fruit and vegetables arrive from Daylesford Organic. The menu changes with the season, but the current menu lists potted smoked trout, a twice-baked cheese souffle with red-onion marmalade, seared lamb rump with courgette, lemon and rosemary risotto, and a boar burger with Monterey Jack and chilli jam. There is battered haddock with chips and garden peas for anyone who would rather not think about it. Two changing cask ales are on, often Cotswold Lion or Hook Norton's Hooky Mild. Farrier innkeepers were shoeing travellers here from 1726, and the present interior still refers to the craft.

Up on the ridge, where the village lane meets the A40 at Asthall Barrow, the other pub is newer and busy. The Farmer's Dog opened in August 2024 in what had been the Windmill, and it belongs to Jeremy Clarkson. It cooks with British-farmed ingredients wherever it can — Cotswold sausage with mash and Hawkstone gravy, slow-roasted saddle of lamb with a faggot, cold-smoked Bibury trout, confit duck leg with heritage beetroot. Dogs are welcome, though the pub asks you to keep the numbers down because the place fills up. Beside it sit Hops & Chops, a butcher and bottle shop, and an outpost of the Diddly Squat farm shop selling jam, honey, crisps and, inexplicably, clothing.

Down the hill to St Nicholas

The church, manor and village centre lie down the hill. The lane drops off the ridge into a compact settlement of Cotswold stone — pub, church, manor — before crossing the river toward Swinbrook.

The Church of Saint Nicholas is small, with Romanesque origins, a 13th-century north transept and chancel, and a round stone font from the same early period. Inside there is a tomb recess of about 1350 holding a reclining female figure with a lion at her feet, a barrel-vaulted chancel roof and Victorian wall paintings. The west tower is battlemented and rises in three stages.

Manor stories and Windrush paths

Next to the church stands Asthall Manor, a Jacobean house the Mitford family lived in through the 1920s. Lord Redesdale bought it in 1919, and it helped shape Alconleigh in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, later remembered it as "the archetypal ancient Cotswold manor house, hard by the church, a garden descending to the River Windrush with the prettiest village imaginable." It is a private home now, opening for a regular programme of garden visits, workshops and events.

The walking is the main event for many. A four-mile route runs from Asthall through cattle-grazed water meadows to Swinbrook, passing the church, the manor and St Mary's, with a longer five-and-a-half-mile option through Widford and Burford. Expect lanes, stone stiles and riverside paths; the extended loop crosses the A40 roundabout, which is busy.

Burials, buried gold and the way in

Two things came out of the ground here worth knowing. Asthall Barrow, the mound by the road, is an Anglo-Saxon burial that gave up Saxon pottery and a cremation when it was partly excavated in 1923. In the summer of 2007, building work under a village driveway turned up 210 gold angels and half-angels from between 1470 and 1547, possibly church wealth hidden at the Dissolution, or a wool merchant's savings.

Getting here means the A40, which passes above the village at Asthall roundabout; Burford is a short drive west. Trains stop at Shipton, about four and a half miles off, but the service is thin, so Charlbury or Kingham are the better bet. The Stagecoach 234 stops outside the Farmer's Dog roughly hourly, and it is a steep fifteen-minute walk down to the manor from there.

A village voice and the sound of water

Bob Arnold, who played Tom Forrest in The Archers for decades, was born in the village and was long associated with it. On a quiet afternoon, the Windrush is often the loudest thing in the village.