The George sits in Lower Brailes, at the lower end of a village that spreads itself between two settlements rather than gathering around one green. It is the only pub still pouring in Brailes, and it works hard at the job: handmade burgers, stone-baked pizzas, chef's seafood specials, Sunday roasts, and a full English with fresh pastries in the morning. Well-behaved dogs get water bowls in the bar and garden; children get their own menu, highchairs and room to stretch their legs. There are rooms upstairs if you want to stay, quizzes and live music through the year, and a Post Office counter that opens on two mornings a week.
A few doors along the same stretch, Paddock Farm Butchery sells meat from its own land. Nick and Jon Francis established Paddock Farm in 2008 and raise Tamworth pigs and pasture-fed Hereford cattle, slow-growing animals hung and butchered for flavour rather than speed. Damian Clisby, head chef at The Rectory in Tetbury, put it plainly: "Paddock Farm's meat is all excellent, beautifully butchered and hung for the right length of time." For the rest of a picnic there is La Tradition, a French bakery at the Feldon Centre, and Baldwin's, the newsagent, which keeps fresh seasonal vegetables alongside the papers.
The building you will see first, from almost anywhere, is St George's. Locals call it the Cathedral of the Feldon, and the dimensions explain why: 49 metres long, 17 wide, with a fifteenth-century west tower rising 36 metres over the surrounding farmland. Along each side of the nave runs a clerestory of twelve two-light Decorated windows. There are carved beasts, monster heads and gargoyles under the roofline, faint traces of fifteenth-century painting above, and an octagonal font from around 1300 cut with eight different tracery patterns, no two alike. One of the bells was recast in 1671 and still carries the inscription cut into it then: Merry George I was and will be still.
The walking here is the real reason to bring boots. The parish holds 24.6 miles of footpaths and bridleways, many with dog gates set into the stiles, reaching out to Tysoe, Shipston-on-Stour and Long Compton. The Sutton Circular looks across the Feldon Valley and comes back beside Sutton Brook. A steeper route climbs from the old Gate Inn towards Castle Hill by way of a flight known as the 99 Steps. Brailes Hill is the second-highest point in Warwickshire, and the paths near its summit open out across the neighbouring valleys. For spring, the longer loop through Cherington to Whichford Woods is the one to save for bluebell season.
Above Upper Brailes sits Castle Hill Motte, a scheduled monument: a flat-topped mound about 24 metres across, ringed by a ditch, raised by Robert Newburgh, Earl of Warwick, in the early twelfth century. The village below was already substantial long before that. Domesday recorded 145 households at Brailes, among the largest one-in-five settlements in the survey, and valued the place at £55 in 1086, up from £17 10s twenty years earlier. In 1248 Henry III granted a Monday market and a fair around St George's Day; a horse fair later ran on what is now the war-memorial green, and the village kept four blacksmiths. In 1914 the village Institute became a ten-bed Red Cross hospital for wounded Belgian soldiers.
Brailes lies on the Oxfordshire border, within the Cotswolds National Landscape, with the B4035 running through on the road between Banbury and Shipston-on-Stour. The nearest station is Moreton-in-Marsh, about eight miles off, and the Shipston Link bus threads through the smaller villages towards Stratford-upon-Avon. Upton House, the Rollright Stones and the Cotswolds Distillery at Stourton are all within an easy drive.
Once a year the Village Hall playing field fills up for the Brailes Show, with produce and baking, crafts and photography, cups and trophies, live music and a dog show. The rest of the year it holds the playground and the playing fields, and the ordinary business of a village that has kept its butcher, its baker and its pub.
