The Village Pub has oak beams, open fires and six bedrooms above the pub, and has long been a food destination in Barnsley. The kitchen keeps to traditional food done properly: monkfish scampi with tartare sauce, peppered venison carpaccio, a honey-and-mustard-glazed ham hock to share with duck egg and chips, smoked halloumi with chilli jam, and sticky toffee pudding to finish. On Sundays there is a lamb-shoulder roast with mint sauce. The ales are local and gravity-fed, with Tom Long from Stroud Brewery and Gloucester Gold from Arkell's on the list. Dogs are welcome, though it is worth checking the indoor rules when you book. In summer the garden runs acoustic music and barbecues, and there is a sheltered courtyard round the back for the days the Cotswold weather cannot decide.
Across the village is THE PIG-in the Cotswolds, which now runs the pub as its informal counterpart. It occupies the former Barnsley House and cooks from a changing 25 Mile Menu built on its own kitchen garden and small local producers: whipped cod's roe with crispbread, Jesse Smith's pork belly with parsley-and-apple salad, chilled garden beetroot soup, whole Bibury trout with herb butter and a gooseberry-and-fennel slaw, and a gardener's summer vegetable risotto. Children get their own menu of sausage, chips and beans, fish of the day, pasta, or grilled chicken. Non-residents can book a table, and the dining room looks straight out onto the formal garden.
That garden is the reason a lot of people come. Rosemary Verey and her husband David, an architectural historian, laid it out from the 1950s, and it became well enough known that Historic England now describes her as an influential plantswoman, writer and designer. It is registered Grade II*, about a hectare, and stitched together from a knot garden, a potager, a Lime Walk and a Long Vista that ends at the Frog Fountain, carved by Simon Verity in 1971 with the frogs done by Judith Verity. There is a classical temple moved here from Fairford Park in 1962-63, and an eighteenth-century Gothick summerhouse. Verey also founded the Barnsley Village Festival, which opens private gardens to raise money for the village and still runs in May.
For food from a basket rather than a plate, the Organic Farm Shop at Abbey Home Farm sits a short way out on the Burford Road, with a café attached. It is largely wheelchair accessible and takes assistance dogs, though not other dogs around the shop and gardens.
The Church of St Mary has been altered in almost every century since the twelfth, and the layers show. Norman corbel tables survive along the walls, the chancel arch is thirteenth-century, the chancel roof is a fourteenth-century construction of trussed rafters, and the north aisle is late fifteenth. Inside there is an Early English piscina, dog-tooth moulding, a set of Norman capitals each carved differently, and monuments to the Bourchier family, who held the manor from the sixteenth century. Before them the manor had passed through the jointure of every one of Henry VIII's wives; when Catherine Parr died in 1548 it came to Anthony Bourchier.
The land here has been worked for a very long time. A Roman villa and its fields lie in Barnsley Park, its main house and bath suite built around AD 350-360. The Domesday surveyors recorded two mills and ten acres of meadow, and valued the manor at eighteen pounds in 1066 and the same eighteen pounds twenty years later.
The walking is gentle. The Barnsley Circular is a 2.8-mile loop over rolling farmland and wildflower meadows, with brown hares if you are early and quiet. A longer route runs north through Barnsley Park to Winson, drops to the River Coln at Ablington and comes back south, roughly six and three-quarter miles of stone stiles and parkland. Cirencester is about four miles down the road for a market town and buses; the 855 links the village to Bibury and Bourton, and Kemble station is the nearest train.
Come at dusk and the stone goes the colour of weak tea, the Long Vista running down to the Frog Fountain at its end.
