The Bell stands on the High Street behind exposed stone and bay windows, with a wood-burner going through the cold months and sport on the television in the corner. It is the only pub still open in Avening, and its kitchen is run in partnership with a local Indian restaurant, so the menu has run further than most village pubs manage: past dishes have included lamb, garlic prawns, a medium chicken curry and lamb rogan josh. There is Timothy Taylor Landlord on permanently, three changing beers alongside it, often Butcombe's Adam Henson's Rare Breed, a garden out the back, and dogs welcome at the bar. The local CAMRA branch calls it "quietly addictive and quite difficult to leave," which is roughly what a bar with a chatty crowd tends to earn.
Beyond the Bell, village life runs through shared spaces rather than a shopfront. A weekly community café operates out of the Social Club, started in 2018, pouring tea and coffee and putting out cakes and biscuits made by volunteers, with dietary requests taken. In the play park nearby there is a pocket orchard, twenty-one fruit trees planted in 2021 at the instigation of a resident ecologist, Phoebe Carter, and anyone may pick from them. The varieties are heritage Gloucestershire apples and plums: Ashmead's Kernel, Hunt's Duke of Gloucester, Czar, and a plum recorded here as the Shit Smock. The grassland left unimproved beneath the trees holds orchids, grass snakes, slow worms and the Dingy Skipper butterfly, and there are benches, picnic space and the occasional juicing event. Next door, the recreation ground off Rectory Lane has a playing field and a children's play area.
The village sits in a deep, curving valley with open plateau above it, and the centre alternates between tight stone-walled lanes and sudden views across meadows and wooded slopes. A stream runs beside, and sometimes through, the cottage gardens near Woodstock Lane. Steps Lane climbs steeply from tree cover to open country, and the tower of the Church of the Holy Cross fills many of the westward views.
Walkers have a choice of distance. From the Bell a 7.5-mile circular climbs for views over the Gatcombe Estate, crosses Chavenage Green and returns through a quiet hidden valley; allow around four and a half hours and expect some steep slopes. For an hour on foot, a parish circuit threads Woodstock Lane, the churchyard, an old packhorse trail, Pound Hill and a surviving Second World War pillbox before dropping to the valley brook. A separate trail traces the village's former drinking houses — the New Inn, Rising Sun, Nag's Head, Butcher's Arms and the old Cross among them — most of them now private homes the walker is asked to respect.
The church earns the attention it gets. A large Norman doorway of chevron carving rests on twisted shafts, and inside there is a Norman arcade and chancel arch, a fourteenth-century timber wagon roof, a holy table dated 1657 and two windows by Christopher Whall from around 1908. In the north transept kneels the effigy of Henry Brydges, who lived at Avening Court and received a royal pardon for piracy from James I in 1611. Local tradition says Queen Matilda instigated the building, consecrated around 1080, and gives the village its oddest survival: Pig Face Day, a church procession carrying a pig's head followed by a feast. In the 1950s the Bell's landlords Joyce and Ernie Moss revived it and reportedly made more than a thousand sandwiches from twelve pigs' heads.
The place is older and was once busier than it looks. Domesday recorded sixty households, five mills and an annual value of twenty-seven pounds, which put Avening among the larger settlements of its day. Its later shape came from cloth: mills and cottage weaving from the seventeenth century well into the nineteenth, leaving the High Street its rows of former mill buildings.
Getting here is simplest by road along the B4014 between Tetbury and Nailsworth. The Stagecoach 620 links the village with Tetbury, Minchinhampton and Stroud, the nearest railhead, and some journeys carry on to Westonbirt Arboretum, an easy day out for its 2,500 types of tree and shrub, treetop walkway and Gruffalo trail.
On the wall of the Memorial Hall, a tablet lists forty-two men lost in the First World War and ten in the Second. Among those who went was the Reverend Edward Fowles, a former missionary in China, sent to France with the Chinese Labour Battalions because he was one of the few who knew the language and the customs.
