Buckland has one place to eat, and it is a country-house hotel. Buckland Manor grows herbs in its own grounds and takes most of its produce from the Vale of Evesham, a few miles north; the head chef, Joe Cerrato, builds the menus around what the season allows. The menus are seasonal samples, but they give the measure of the kitchen: Gloucestershire Old Spot charcuterie with pickles, Ryland lamb shoulder with confit carrot and lamb jus, Cornish sole with baby leeks, mussels and Champagne sauce, and a dessert listed as Milk & Buckland Honey, made with mead junket, burnt honey and milk crumble. The hotel describes its dining rooms as "intimate, calm and quietly celebratory."
There is a Sunday lunch, an afternoon tea, and a children's menu that runs to a beef burger with Cheddar and fries, sausages with mash, peas and gravy, and fresh pasta with tomato sauce or pesto. What there is not is a pub, a shop or a bakery. Buckland is a small estate village, and the manor is where you eat and drink.
The Church of St Michael stands close by, forming a tight group with the manor and the rectory. It is worth going inside for the roof: a four-bay nave with tie-beam trusses that still carry their painted medieval decoration. The walls are left unplastered. There are medieval tiles in the south aisle, a holy-water stoup by the door, the worn remains of a rood-screen stair, and a fifteenth-century cope in the north aisle. A marble monument to James Thynne, who died in 1709, is the finest thing of its date here. The fabric runs from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth, with further work in 1585 and the seventeenth century, and F. S. Waller restored the church in 1885. Book of Common Prayer Evensong is said on the first Sunday of most months.
The rectory beside it dates to about 1480 and remains a private dwelling; Detmar Blow altered it in 1932. The manor, the church and the rectory stand close together, which is a good deal of listed stone for a village this small.
The manor's most unexpected resident arrived long before it took in guests. Mary Delany spent several years here as a girl in the early eighteenth century. In her seventies she began cutting paper into flowers, and made 985 botanical collages of extraordinary precision; most of them went to the British Museum in 1897.
The real reason to base yourself here is the walking. Buckland sits directly below Burhill on the Cotswold escarpment, and the ground rises steeply behind the houses. A 7.5-mile circular from Broadway takes in Stanton and Laverton, both stone villages, and passes through Buckland on the way. It crosses meadows, climbs beside a coppice on the Cotswold Way, skirts Buckland Wood and Shenberrow Hill, drops down to Stanton, and finishes with a stiff wooded climb onto Burhill; allow the best part of five hours. Burhill is an Iron Age hillfort, though little of the rampart survives now, and the spur it stands on overlooks the village and the valley beyond.
The manor belonged to Gloucester Abbey at the time of Domesday, when Buckland had thirty-six households and ten acres of meadow, and its annual value to the lord had risen from three pounds in 1066 to nine by 1086.
Broadway is the obvious neighbour, immediately north and the start of that circular walk. Snowshill Manor, a National Trust house crammed with one man's collection of handmade objects, is close by, with a café, a second-hand bookshop and a model harbour called Wolf's Cove for children. Broadway Tower, James Wyatt's turreted "Saxon Tower," conceived by Capability Brown and completed in 1798, stands on the escarpment in its own park.
The nearest station is Honeybourne, managed by Great Western Railway, with step-free access and parking. Otherwise Buckland is reached by minor roads south of Broadway, and Pulhams' 606 bus stops at Buckland Turn on the Chipping Campden to Cheltenham route; check the current timetable for days and times.
Walking is a strong reason to base yourself here.
