At the top of the climb, where the A44 finally levels out, the Horse and Groom looks back east over Moreton-in-Marsh and the Evenlode valley. It is the village's one pub, a stone country inn with rooms, a large garden and, since 2024, a kitchen run by Nathan Eades and Liam Goff. Their cooking is classic British and leans on local suppliers and local game: grilled meat with fries, peppercorn sauce and salad; pies, pasta and burgers; a poached pear and almond tart that the Michelin inspectors singled out. The pie has a reputation of its own, having been called the best in England by The Times. Michelin has kept the pub in its Bib Gourmand list. Giles Coren went further, describing it as "almost certainly the best pub in England."
Dogs are welcome in both the bar and the bedrooms, and the garden is where you want to be on a clear afternoon, with views across the valley. The pub is tied to the Donnington Brewery, which still brews using a water wheel at a thirteenth-century mill, where Richard Arkell started making beer in 1865. No particular ale on the pumps can be promised in advance, so order and see.
The rest of the village is a main street of Cotswold stone that climbs the escarpment. Bourton climbs rather than sprawls, and the main pleasure of staying here is the walking that starts at the door. The Heart of England Way passes straight through on its hundred-mile line between Cannock Chase and Bourton-on-the-Water; a signed section drops down toward Broad Campden one way and heads on to Upper Swell the other. Nearby runs the Monarch's Way, which traces Charles II's escape after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Footpaths lead out through open fields and woodland into the kind of long views the hilltop promises.
Two of those views have been planted deliberately. Behind Middle Farm the community orchard holds more than thirty fruit trees, extended in 2023 by Coronation Wood, native British trees put in for Charles III's coronation. Above the village, off Keytes Lane, Millennium Wood was established in 2000 on land given by a local farmer, Michael Gaden, and the Towler Trust, with the trees paid for by people who live here. The Old School serves as the village hall, hosting clubs, screenings, an annual fête and Open Gardens.
Bourton House sits in the village itself, on land that once belonged to a monastery. Its tithe barn carries a dedication stone dated 1570, and the house was rebuilt in 1598 by the lawyer Sir Nicholas Overbury and again in the early eighteenth century by Alexander Popham, who kept its odd little towers. The three-acre garden that R. Paice and his wife made here from a wilderness over twenty-five years is now topiary, exotic planting and spring-fed water, with a seven-acre pasture walk among specimen trees. It won a national garden-of-the-year award two decades after first opening for a single afternoon in 1987.
The stranger house is next door. At Sezincote, Charles Cockerell had his architect brother Samuel build a Mughal palace of copper onion dome, minarets and peacock-tail windows, finished in a Rajasthan style around an English Greek Revival interior, with a Repton landscape falling away to spring-fed pools. The Prince Regent visited in 1807, and the visit reportedly influenced his revised plans for Brighton's Royal Pavilion. The estate believes it may be the only surviving Mughal building in Western Europe.
The church, now St Lawrence and dedicated to St Mary in the Middle Ages, is Grade I: a twelfth-century nave, a fourteenth-century chancel, a fifteenth-century tower, and a nineteenth-century porch. Inside are a Romanesque arcade on round scalloped piers, an octagonal font, and a standard Winchester bushel and peck from 1816 kept for the honest measuring of grain.
Moreton-in-Marsh, the market town and station, is two and a half miles east on the Cotswold Line to London and visible from the top of the street. Batsford Arboretum and its falconry centre are a short way off. On a still evening the best seat in the village is the pub garden, with the valley going gold and a dog asleep under the table.
