Bledington

Green, Brook and Cider House

Ducks and bantams roam free around the King's Head Inn, which sits at one end of a wide green with a Victorian maypole still standing in it. Bledington Brook runs along the edge of the green and crosses it on a footbridge. The houses are light honeycomb Cotswold stone and group around this open space, four miles southeast of Stow-on-the-Wold, where the River Evenlode marks the boundary between Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.

The King's Head is the only pub. It has been since 1889, when the village had two alehouses and then didn't. It was built in the 16th century as a cider house, and the cider-making carried on in some form until about 1960. Archie and Nicola Orr-Ewing own and have restored it — Cotswold stone walls, oak beams, flagstone floors, an inglenook fireplace, 12 bedrooms between the Inn and the Courtyard.

A Pub Worth Planning For

The food has two AA Rosettes. Head chef Giles Lee came from L'Ortolan at Shinfield and the French Horn at Sonning, both three-Rosette kitchens, which is a lot of pedigree for a village of 500 people. The menu is seasonal, organic and mostly local: the Sunday roast, a steak and mushroom pie, salmon, raspberry bread pudding. On Sundays you can order a whole joint of beef, pork or lamb carved at the table for six or more, if you ask three days ahead. Book a Sunday table two weeks out. Hook Norton Best is brewed nearby and kept on tap. Dogs are welcome in the bar, with bowls provided, though not in the restaurant.

The Sunday Times called it "the classic English country pub that one always hopes to find but seldom does." A visitor put it more plainly: "a lovely old pub in a lovely village."

Community Effort and Medieval Glass

The village shop closed in 2006, along with the post office. It took nearly ten years, over £350,000 raised — 80 percent of it locally — and more than 300 villagers to open a new one. The Bledington Community Shop and Café is owned by over 360 residents and run by volunteers. The café opened in November 2019.

The Church of St Leonard is the only Grade I building here, out of 32 listed in the parish. It is twelfth-century in origin, much rebuilt in the late fifteenth. The north nave wall holds a fine collection of medieval stained glass, one window dated 1470, with the donors' names still in the glass. The font is a Norman tub. There are six bells, and one cast in 1639 reads "We are the bells of Bledington and Charles is our King."

Morris, Rail and Woodland

Bledington gives its name to a distinct style of Cotswold Morris dancing, collected by Cecil Sharp — around thirty dances, nearly all of them with handkerchiefs. Nobody had performed them locally since 1960.

Kingham station is a mile or so away, roughly an hour and a quarter from Paddington, and the B4450 runs through toward Chipping Norton. Daylesford Organic is two miles off, Stow ten minutes. Foxholes Nature Reserve, ancient woodland, is within walking distance, and footpaths follow the Evenlode through flat water meadows.

Three Pounds in Domesday

In the Domesday Book the surveyors counted eight villagers, a mill, and thirty acres of meadow, and valued the whole place at three pounds. It had been worth four twenty years earlier.