The Great Western Arms stands on Station Road with a small sun-trap courtyard of five tables at the back, which is worth knowing before you picture a lawn. The kitchen cooks chicken-liver pâté with pickled red onion and chutney, roasted lamb rump with chickpea-and-aubergine purée, pork belly with creamy mash and hispi cabbage, a wild-mushroom risotto, fish and chips, and monkfish tail in a vermouth sauce. The meat comes from Todenham Manor Farm and the vegetables from Veg Matters. Sundays bring a roast, and the printed menu lists a "dog roast" beside it; dogs are welcome. The pub advertises Hook Norton cask ales, and there are quiz nights, live music and the occasional beer festival.
Up on the High Street, the Crown Hotel is a small country inn with rooms, a restaurant and a real fire, its bar open to people who are not staying the night. It pours Fuller's London Pride, runs a Friday curry night and puts on South Asian food evenings, which is not what you expect from a Cotswold inn.
Then there is Blockley Café, run since 2017 by Craig Stanley, who grew up here and cooked at Buckland Manor, The Slaughters Manor House and Soho Farmhouse before coming home. Breakfast and brunch run to eggs Benedict and chorizo hash; pastries and doughnuts appear through the day, and every four weeks there is an evening "Kembleford Seasonal Supper." Well-behaved dogs are allowed downstairs. In the Cotswold-stone building adjoining the café, the village shop sells artisan produce and the makings of a picnic. You will want to walk.
The valley climbs steeply on both sides, meadow and arable field giving way to open wolds and wooded ridge, with Batsford Park framing the longer views. A signed nine-mile circular links Blockley with Chipping Campden, going out through Broad Campden and the Northwick Estate, past Norcombe Wood and Shales Coppice, dropping into the village for about three-quarters of a mile of street before climbing back past a disused quarry. Allow the better part of a morning; the grading is moderate mostly on account of the slopes. The nearest trains are at Moreton-in-Marsh on the Great Western line, and Stagecoach buses 1, 2 and 3 connect the two Monday to Saturday, carrying on to Chipping Campden and Stratford-upon-Avon.
The same bus corridor passes Batsford Arboretum, where more than 2,850 labelled trees include the National Collection of Japanese flowering cherries, alongside maples, magnolias and bamboo. A little further sits Sezincote, a Mughal-style Indian palace under a copper onion dome, its grounds laid out with temples, grottoes and canals; the Prince Regent's visit in 1807 is credited with influencing the design of the Brighton Pavilion.
From the hills above, the church of St Peter & St Paul is usually the first thing you see, the tower rising as the road tips into the valley while the mills and cottages stay hidden below. The chancel and nave are late-twelfth-century, reworked in the fourteenth and fifteenth; the west tower was added in 1725–27 by Edward or Thomas Woodward of Chipping Campden. Inside there is a fifteenth-century wooden chancel screen, memorials to the Rushout and Childe families, busts by Rysbrack and a Baroque monument to Edward Croft. The ten bells include two cast in 1638, one inscribed "GOD SAVE THE KING 1638." On television the church stands in as St Mary's in Kembleford, and the old vicarage becomes Father Brown's presbytery.
Blockley is older than any of it. The Domesday surveyors counted 107 households, twelve mills worth £2 11s 7d, and valued the whole place at £20. A minster here had been sold by Burgred of Mercia to the Bishop of Worcester back in 855. From the late eighteenth century the mills turned to silk-throwing, worked by twisters who came down from Coventry, and their housing still shapes the streets; when European trade resumed after 1815 the work slowly died away. Blockley belonged to Worcestershire, as a detached island of it, until the boundaries were tidied in 1931 and it became part of Gloucestershire.
Samuel Lewis, writing in 1848, called the setting "shady groves, fruitful vales, and sloping hills." Stand on the street on a still afternoon, with the brook going past and the tower up on its hill, and you can hear why the silk twisters came from Coventry to end up here.
