Brimpsfield

Hall life on the high wold

On Friday evenings the bar in Brimpsfield's village hall opens for drinks, and for now that is where the village does its social drinking. There is no conventional pub or shop in Brimpsfield; the hall bar is the village's social-drinking venue. What the village has instead is a hall its volunteers extended and refurbished from 2022 onward, an active bar rota, and the habit of treating it as the main place to gather.

You are high on the wold, in the Cotswolds National Landscape, roughly seven miles from Cheltenham and nine each from Gloucester and Cirencester. The A417 runs just to the east, close enough for the towns. South of the houses the infant River Frome begins its run through meadow and wooded valley.

Supplies and nearby inns

Supplies take a little planning. Cotteswold Dairies delivers milk and groceries three days a week, which provides some essentials. For anything more, Miserden has the nearest village shop and post office, going for more than a hundred years, with fresh local bread, cakes, fruit, vegetables and meat. Brockworth is where you go for a fuller range and for petrol. The Miserden estate also sells direct: pasture-fed Belted Galloway beef boxes from cattle grazed on low-input wildflower grassland, and seasonal venison.

For a proper pub you drive out. The Green Dragon at Cockleford is a seventeenth-century inn with beamed ceilings, stone-flagged floors, log fires and bars and furniture made by Robert Thompson, the Mouseman of Kilburn, whose small carved mouse is worth hunting for on the woodwork. A recent kitchen menu has featured cod fish-finger and tartare sandwiches, a Somerset Brie, rocket and cranberry sandwich, and a piri-piri chicken and mozzarella panini, with spaghetti Bolognese and Gloucester Old Spot chipolatas for children; check what's currently on before you go. It has nine bedrooms and a shop of its own. At Elkstone, the Highwayman is an Arkell's coaching inn on the old Ermin Way, all low beams and stripped stone, with a replica carriage parked outside and a Sunday lunch. Ian Blake keeps it, and dogs are allowed in both the bar and the restaurant. A mile and a half off, the Royal George at Birdlip is also dog friendly.

River walking and the vanished castles

The walking justifies the whole trip. A four-mile circular starts from the village-hall car park and takes about two and a half hours, heading south towards Syde and Caudle Green, past the site of the medieval castle, then following the young Frome through meadow, stream valley and woodland. There are two early stiles and one steady steep climb near the end. Walkers are asked to leave cars at the hall, where parking is free with voluntary contributions welcomed, and to keep off the village's narrow lanes.

The castle is not much to look at now. The Giffards held Brimpsfield from the Norman period, and their stone castle was pulled down by royal forces after John Giffard, second Lord of Brimpsfield, rebelled against Edward II and was executed in 1322. What remains can be seen from the footpath to the church, though the earthworks sit on private land. An older motte survives on a valley-side spur nearby, a flat-topped oval mound and encircling ditch, and to the south-west lie the earthworks of Manless Town, a deserted medieval settlement partly overlying the buried remains of a probable Roman camp.

Church, priory and Domesday

The church is worth the field path. St Michael and All Angels — the Church of St Michael in the official listing — is Grade I listed and grew in stages: an early-twelfth-century nave, thirteenth-century chancel, fourteenth-century porch, fifteenth-century tower. By the south doorway is a scratch mass dial cut for telling the time by the sun. Inside are complete rood-loft stairs, fragments of medieval wall-painting, a carved oak pulpit dated 1658 and a fifteenth-century font. The six bells have recently been rehung and extended. A Giffard founded the church and gave it to an abbey in Normandy, which made it an alien priory, seized again and again during the French wars until it passed to Eton College, still one of its patrons.

Domesday found forty households here, three lord's plough teams and twelve of the men's, two mills, and a village valued at twelve pounds a year to its lord, the same in 1086 as in 1066.

The village show

The Brimpsfield Village Show began in January 1976, devised by a group led by Harold and Frances Masding as a Victorian-style Christmas party to see off the flat days after Christmas. It ran for about forty years and raised thousands for local causes, which is a lot of jam and raffle tickets for a place this small.