Beside the Queen's Head on the High Street stands a small windowless stone box: an 18th-century lock-up called the Blind House. It served as a lock-up for temporary detention, and on some summer days it opens so you can look inside. The pub next to it is Grade II listed and family-run. The pub does not serve food, though you are welcome to bring your own or a takeaway. Behind is a beer garden looking over the recreation ground, with a boules piste and a children's play area, and a bar that runs to real ales, Guinness, world lagers and three ciders.
For a sit-down meal you have two Butcombe pubs: the Northey Arms on Bath Road and the Quarryman's Arms on Box Hill. The Northey Arms sits on the Bath Road, a level walk from the centre, a refurbished country inn with thirteen rooms, a large garden and a car park. The kitchen names its suppliers — Walter Rose Butchers, Kingfisher of Brixham, Hobbs House Bakery — and puts Butcombe Gold beer-battered fish and chips and Sunday roasts front and centre. The building was once the hotel for Box's railway station, which opened in 1841 and closed in 1965.
The Quarryman's Arms is the harder-won of the two, a steep uphill walk to Box Hill, where a four-room inn more than 250 years old looks over the Bybrook valley from a covered, heated terrace. It began as a beer-house, kept by a shoemaker named Henry Bunting from 1864 to 1871, and was later renamed the Carpenter's Arms. The food is traditional and seasonal, with Sunday roasts, and dogs are welcome.
Further along the High Street, Bengal Bear has served Indian and South-East Asian food since 2014. The menu reaches past the familiar into Poncho Khana with roasted coconut and coconut milk, Grameen Khana with curry leaf and mustard seed, Fish Molly and Ulathia Lamb, with vegan versions of the Molly and the Malaber. For coffee and something baked, Toast occupies the Old Dairy on Market Place, dog friendly, doing breads, pastries and cooked meals to eat in or collect. Londis on the High Street covers the rest — bread, fruit and veg, fresh meat, newspapers and a cash machine.
The Church of St Thomas à Becket is Grade I listed, with 12th-century origins. The crossing tower is 14th-century, carrying a 15th-century bell stage and a recessed octagonal spire. Inside are a 15th-century octagonal font, the stone effigy of A. Long, who died in 1578, and stained glass signed by P. H. Newman.
Under the ground near the church lies a Roman courtyard villa, occupied from the 2nd to 4th centuries, with hypocaust heating, drainage suggesting a bath house, and twenty known mosaic floors that rank among the most extensive in the country. It remains buried, and is not presented as a visitor attraction.
Brunel's Box Tunnel bores 9,636 feet through the hill, and when it opened on 30 June 1841 it was the longest railway tunnel in the world. The two drives, worked from opposite ends, met with less than two inches of error, and at its peak the work got through roughly a ton each of candles and explosives a week. A long-told story that the rising sun shines clean through it on Brunel's birthday turns out not to be true, though the sun does line up on other April and September mornings.
Box Mill was bought by Peter Gabriel in the 1980s and became Real World Studios, home to WOMAD; Robert Plant, Deep Purple, Coldplay, Tom Jones and Harry Styles have all recorded here. And it was while he lived in Box that the Rev. W. V. Awdry conceived Thomas the Tank Engine; a plaque marks Lorne House.
The village sits in the steep-sided By Brook valley, honey-coloured stone climbing both slopes, with quarry-scarred Box Hill above, within the Cotswolds National Landscape. The Box Heritage Trail makes a 4.5-mile circuit with views over the valley and markers explaining the quarrying, milling and the railway; the Macmillan Way and Cross Cotswold Path pass through, with more than a hundred rights of way to pick from. The A4 runs through, Bath is about five miles south-west and Corsham three to the east, with the Faresaver bus linking all three. The nearest trains are at Bath Spa, a little under seven miles by road.
The recreation ground was given to the parish in 1926 and still holds the cricket pitch, the bowling green and the tennis courts; Box turns out both a men's and a women's cricket side. On a warm Saturday, it is easy to imagine the sound of a game carrying up the valley to the Queen's Head garden above it.
