The High Street runs along a broad, straight axis aimed at the gates of Badminton House. It is a broad walled axis, ochre-washed terraces and Queen Anne houses giving way to Victorian estate cottages, with trees closing the view at both ends. Country Life called it "a charming architectural set piece, redolent of benevolent feudalism." You are in an estate village, and the street is oriented towards the house gates.
Drewetts Stores on the High Street is the shop and the Post Office, stocking the drinks, ices and snacks that walkers reach for on the way out. It's a useful stop, so plan the rest of your supplies around a car.
The walking is the reason to stay. From the Memorial Hall on Haye's Lane, an easy 2.5-mile route runs out and back through Badminton Park to Little Badminton, generally level on lanes and rights of way. It passes Park Pond, the horse-trials arena, the tiny 13th-century church at Little Badminton and a view of the medieval dovecote. A longer five-mile circular, stile-free but on unsurfaced paths, crosses the estate's grassy airstrip, threads past castellated barns and Seven Mile Plantation, and passes through the deer park.
A few things to know before you set off. The estate is a private working one, and access is only on the marked public rights of way. Keep to the paths, keep dogs on short leads near the red-deer herd, and check the estate notice first: the park route closes around the Horse Trials each spring.
There is no pub in Badminton itself. The nearest is the Fox & Hounds at Acton Turville, about a mile off, a former coaching house with a garden courtyard, four en-suite rooms and dogs welcome. The Sunday menu runs from topside of beef, leg of lamb, turkey crown and roasted pork to a mushroom-and-Brie Wellington, with cod and chips and a pie of the day alongside; sticky toffee pudding, chocolate brownie, Eton mess and a crumble of the day finish it. The route 41 bus links the village Post Office to Acton Turville, Sherston, Malmesbury and Yate, Monday to Saturday, and the A46 and M4 Junction 18 are a few minutes' drive. The nearest station is Yate; Badminton's own closed in 1968, though the line through it still runs.
The church is St Michael and All Angels, built in 1785 by Charles Evans of London on the model of Gibbs's St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a chancel and apse added in 1875. Inside are a tunnel-vaulted nave, four saucer domes over the aisles, 1785 horse-box pews, and Beaufort heraldic glass by Thomas Willement. Grinling Gibbons carved the marble monument to the 1st Duke, who reclines above a relief of St George and the Dragon; Rysbrack did the 2nd, 3rd and 4th.
The house behind the gates has belonged to the Beaufort family since they acquired the manors of Great and Little Badminton in 1612. Rebuilding began in the 1660s, and William Kent later gave the north front its Palladian pediment and twin cupolas. The family gave two things their name. One is the sport: guests of the 8th Duke are said to have batted a shuttlecock about the house in 1863, and the name stuck. The other is the Horse Trials, which the 10th Duke started in 1949 so British riders had somewhere to train; the first was won by John Shedden on a five-year-old called Golden Willow, one of twenty-two starters. During the Second World War, Queen Mary stayed here for much of the war as her niece the Duchess's guest.
Long before any of that, the Domesday surveyors counted twenty-four households, a priest, and eight acres of meadow, and valued the whole place at ten pounds in 1066 and ten pounds again in 1086.
Four miles on lies Castle Combe, honey-coloured cottages in a wooded valley; Malmesbury, with its 12th-century abbey and market cross, sits at the far end of the 41 bus; and Westonbirt Arboretum is nearby for a day among the trees. Spend your time here on the walk from the village hall out into the park, and at the shop on the High Street for drinks, ices and snacks.
