The Bear Inn sits opposite the old village lock-up, which was a sensible arrangement, because the manor court met inside the pub between 1766 and 1838. Before that the building was a courthouse and assembly room, put up in the early seventeenth century, with two very large fireplaces and a priest hole somewhere in the walls. It was first recorded as a pub in 1631. People will tell you three ghosts come with it.
What comes with it now is homemade food and a welcome for families and dogs. The light menu runs to cheesy nachos, loaded fries with mature cheddar and chorizo, and a ploughman's built around a pork pie and honey-roast ham, and finishes with blueberry crème brûlée or rhubarb crumble. It is the sort of food that does not ask much of you.
The village had another pub, the Stirrup Cup, once the New Inn, whose front has barely changed since the 1800s. It is closed and waiting for a tenant. Bisley once supported at least thirteen pubs and inns, watering wool merchants and drovers on their way through; wool was supplanted by other trades, and most of the inns closed along with it.
For provisions you are unusually well served for a place this size. Bisley Farm Shop is run by Kate and Mark Andrews, who sell beef, pork and lamb from their own farm a mile off, along with venison, often locally grown fruit and vegetables, Gloucestershire cheeses, fresh and cured fish, plants, and milk from a dispenser. They also carry Dickenson's honey. Jim Dickenson kept 350 hives across Bisley and the surrounding hills, and his son Keith keeps the honey going.
The Greenshop, on the other hand, has been run by three generations of the Budgeon family since 1988. It is an eco shop and cafe with refills, Portway Farm meat, Thursday fish brought up from the Padstow Fish Company, coffee and homemade cakes, and seating beside a lily pond. There is parking and an EV charger. George Stores adds the Post Office, fresh bread, and homemade pies, pasties and sausage rolls, with a room for tea and coffee.
The village sits at the head of a steep-sided valley cut into the Cotswold escarpment, four miles east of Stroud. Walk down and you can reach Stroud off-road in about forty minutes, by way of Catswood, Swifts Hill and Summer Street; the return is the same route uphill, so allow more. For a full outing there is the Bisley Stroll, a circular route of six and a half miles from nearby Eastcombe, about three hours across pasture, streams and wooded valleys, with a few stiles and a couple of short steep pulls. Stroud is also the nearest railway station, roughly three and a half miles away, and the Cotswold Green 8B bus links Bisley with Eastcombe, Oakridge and Stroud.
The Church of All Saints stands over the flat uplands with an octagonal spire that forms a prominent landmark. Its fabric is thirteenth and fourteenth century, extensively rebuilt in 1862 by the Rev. W. H. Lowder. Inside there is a Norman font bowl on a later base, a thirteenth-century knight effigy, medieval coffin lids, a surviving rood-loft stair, musical angels carved on the chancel arch, and George III's royal arms. In the churchyard is a small hexagonal stone structure long taken for a well head and now read as a medieval poor souls' light. When the Domesday surveyors came through they counted 102 households and two priests, and valued the manor at twenty pounds, down four pounds since 1066.
On Wells Road you will find the thing the village is best known to itself for. Bisley Wells are a run of Gothic Revival spring outlets, restored in 1863 for the Rev. Thomas Keble, with five hooded chutes feeding two more below, which is where the old seven-spout name comes from. Every year the villagers dress them with flowers for a ceremony on Ascension Day. Cut into the stone above the water are the words "O YE WELLS / BLESS YE THE LORD / PRAISE HIM / AND MAGNIFY HIM / FOR EVER", and once a year, for an afternoon, the wells become the focal point of village life.
