Aston Subedge

Where the Vale meets the escarpment

St Andrew's has no tower. A west bellcote holds a single bell, dated 1797, the year the present church was finished. Thomas Johnson of Warwick built it in ashlar limestone to replace a medieval predecessor, and gave it an unusual three-sided east apse rather than a straight east wall. John Marius Wilson, surveying the country for his Imperial Gazetteer in the 1870s, recorded a verdict the village has never quite lived down: "The church is tolerable."

That is roughly the scale of the place. Aston Subedge sits at about 90 metres where the Vale of Evesham runs up against the Cotswold escarpment, a small brook draining north-west towards the Avon, the ground behind the roofs climbing to Dover's Hill at 225. Stone, red brick and timber framing stand side by side in the older buildings.

Getting there and eating nearby

For a pub or a shop, you walk to Weston-sub-Edge next door, or drive the two miles to Chipping Campden. Honeybourne, three and a half miles off, is an unstaffed stop on the Cotswold Line with step-free platforms and parking for eleven cars; otherwise it is a car and the lanes between the B4035 and the B4632. The 606 bus passes through Poden Lane on its run from Campden to Cheltenham, and the 1 and 1A head towards Moreton-in-Marsh and Stratford, though it is worth checking the operator before you rely on either.

The Seagrave Arms in Weston-sub-Edge is a restaurant-led country inn: a roughly 400-year-old Cotswold-stone inn with seven bedrooms, bought in 2021 by Alex, a Cambridgeshire farmer's daughter who had worked at the Lygon Arms in Broadway and at the 2012 London Olympics for Sodexo. The cooking is restaurant-led and drawn from local farms. A recent Sunday menu ran to treacle soda bread with whipped salted butter, tarragon gnocchi with wild mushrooms and Parmesan cream, salmon boudin with langoustine sauce, pork loin with prune-and-sage stuffing, and Atlantic cod with curried mussels and clam chowder. Dogs are welcome, and there is a garden courtyard for the days that allow it. Alex's two Cavalier King Charles spaniels are Oscar and Otto. The bar keeps ales from Purity Brewing.

The Village Bar and Campden provisions

For something smaller, the Village Bar sits at the front of Weston-sub-Edge Village Hall and has done since 2017, run by Becky and her team. It calls itself pint-sized and means it. The kitchen does Cotswold tapas, home-cooked pub classics, Sunday roasts and homemade desserts, and there is a games room upstairs with pool and snooker. Dogs and children are both fine.

Chipping Campden, two miles east, supplies the rest. Fillet & Bone is a butcher and farm shop in a centuries-old butcher's premises, selling rare-breed Longhorn beef, Gloucester Old Spot and Saddleback pork, Cotswold lamb, day-boat fish from Cornwall, and cheeses including Hereford Hop and Stinking Bishop. Toke's Food & Drink, a deli and wine shop four generations into the same premises, does Single and Double Gloucester, house-made quiches and pies, Billy's Woodland Eggs, and Toke's Famous Sausage Rolls. The Campden Bakery Shop covers sourdough, focaccia and pastries.

Escarpment walks and Manor Farmhouse

The walking is the reason many people stop. Dover's Hill, a mile south, is a natural amphitheatre on a spur of the escarpment, with a hard, level track from the car park out to the viewpoint and the Vale of Evesham spread below; keep dogs on leads for the grazing livestock. From Chipping Campden a 4.5-mile circular climbs through Lynches Wood, bluebells in May and mud is possible, especially in woodland and on some sections, up to the topograph on Dover's Hill and back. The 102-mile Cotswold Way begins in Campden and follows the western edge of the hills all the way to Bath. Dover's Hill also held the first Cotswold Olimpicks in 1612, and still hosts the modern revival, shin-kicking included.

The village's one great story belongs to Manor Farmhouse, a Grade II*-listed house of 16th- and 17th-century fabric where Endymion Porter, ambassador to Charles I, lived, and where Prince Rupert was a regular guest. Its parish register, begun in 1539, later went missing into the Mickleton parish chest, where someone crossed out the faint "Aston Register" heading and wrote "Mickleton Register" over the top. The Domesday surveyors, older still, valued the whole place at four pounds, down from five twenty years before.

On the way to the hill

Many who pause here are on their way up to the hill, dogs on leads, heading for the view.