Castle Combe

A Steep Descent into History

The clock in the tower of St Andrew's has no face. It has marked the hours with a bell and no dial since medieval times, one of the oldest working clocks of its kind, and it is a fair introduction to Castle Combe, a village that has been looked at a great deal and explains very little of itself.

The place is small and steep. A single street drops from the Market Cross down to the By Brook, lined with cottages of honey-coloured oolitic limestone under stone-tiled roofs, packed tightly together and closed off at both ends by wooded green slopes. At the bottom, Water Lane crosses the brook on a low stone bridge, and this is one of the Cotswolds' most recognisable views. About sixty people live in the historic centre. It is a working village, not a preserved set, and it helps to arrive knowing that.

It also helps to arrive at the right time. The official advice is blunt about it: the average visit lasts a little over an hour, summer afternoons can swamp the centre, and early morning, late afternoon and winter are far calmer. Bank holidays and the middle of the day are the worst of it. There are only around nine parking spaces in the lower village, mostly used by residents, so visitors are directed to the pay-and-display car park at Dunns Lane, up on the B4039 above the village. The walk down from there has no continuous pavement, and neither do most of the streets below, so it is a place to keep children and dogs close.

The Art of the Village Pub

For a village this size, the eating is unusually good. The Castle Inn stands opposite the Market Cross, a traditional inn with an open fire, tables at the front and a sunny patio at the back, and a restaurant carrying two AA Rosettes. Head chef James Boniface cooks British food with French and Spanish leanings, and describes the food as local and seasonal: Hawkstone beer bread with onion butter, scallop with Cotswold chorizo, potted pork, a Cotswold chicken and Manor leek pie, an aged-beef burger with Cotswold nduja and Ogleshield, and a cauliflower curry with nori, raisins and almonds. Dogs are welcome in all the public areas, and there are dog-friendly bedrooms too. The cask ales are Ramsbury Gold and Ramsbury Farmer's Best.

Beside the church is the White Hart, a compact Wadworth pub with low beams, log fires and a small rear courtyard, run by Sally and Dave. It pours Wadworth 6X and Henry's IPA alongside a couple of changing beers, and the low-ceilinged rooms are exactly what the setting promises. Opinions on the welcome vary more than the setting does, so it is worth going in with an open mind rather than a fixed expectation.

The third pub sits apart from the other two. The Salutation Inn is out at the Gibb crossroads, on the edge of Castle Combe rather than down in the valley, run by Ben and Dai since 2018. The building was a turnpike inn at the old Gibraltar gate, and behind its later stonework is a fine 17th-century Tudor-arched fireplace. The kitchen calls itself local and seasonal: Bibury trout pâté with beetroot and horseradish, baked Camembert, teriyaki chicken wings, a fish-finger sandwich, and stone-baked sourdough pizzas that run from margherita to a Meat Feast. Regulars come back for the venison, the pies, the Sunday roasts and the fish and chips. There are three changing cask beers, real cider, and gardens front and back, and dogs are made welcome.

Cafés, Picnics, and Honesty Boxes

Coffee and the makings of a picnic are easier to find than a full shop. The Old Stables Coffee Shop, opened in 2017 by Philippa and Yasmin in a converted stables, has a log burner, a sofa and outdoor seating, locally roasted coffee and cakes, and a standing welcome for dogs, cyclists and, by its own notice, ponies. The Little Picnic Shop puts together takeaway picnics, including a vegetarian afternoon-tea box that can be adapted by pre-order for vegan, gluten-free and dairy-free diets, with hampers to hire. Beyond that, the shopping is what the village honestly is: a handful of honesty boxes outside cottages selling cakes, jam, eggs, plants and sometimes Marshfield Farm ice cream, plus an occasional market in the village hall that has been known to bring together honey, fudge, soap, knitting, woodwork and paintings. There is no chain and no souvenir row, and none of the everyday shops of a market town, and that absence is a large part of why the place still looks the way it does. Bring what you need with you.

At the top of the scale is Bybrook, the restaurant inside the 14th-century Manor House hotel on its 365-acre estate. It holds a Michelin star, and under head chef Tom Hamblet the kitchen turns out precise, classically based modern British cooking: Chalk Stream trout with Porthilly oyster and wasabi, Wye Valley asparagus with peas and cured pork belly, Langley Chase lamb, Dexter beef with girolles and turnip, and a strawberry dessert with mascarpone, tonka and elderflower. The hotel also does less formal lounge dining and afternoon tea on its terrace for those not committing to the tasting menu.

The walking is the other reason to stay rather than visit. The most straightforward route is A Walk in the Woods, a stile-free four-mile circuit of about two and a half hours that leaves the upper car park, follows the Macmillan Way through the woods to Long Dean and Ford, and returns along the far bank of the By Brook through beech woodland; the slopes are steep in places. For a longer day, Nigel Vile's three-church walk covers seven miles and links St Andrew's with the deconsecrated St John's at Ford and St James's at North Wraxall, following the brook, gaining hilltop views and using an old coach road. It may trace a medieval pilgrimage corridor between Malmesbury and Glastonbury, though nobody can now be sure of the exact line. Whichever you choose, the village asks that dogs stay on leads where sheep graze, and recent works have restored footpaths and added fencing along the way.

Fine Dining and the Manor Estate

Getting here rewards a little planning. The nearest railway station is Chippenham, on the London Paddington to Bristol line, with step-free access by lift and roughly five and a half miles to the east. By road the village is reached from the B4039 west of Chippenham, off the M4 at junction 17 or 18. Faresaver's 95 and 95A buses connect Chippenham with Castle Combe by way of Biddestone and Yatton Keynell, but the service is sparse rather than turn-up-and-go, so check your outward and return times before relying on it. Public toilets are down on Water Lane, south of the bridge.

Half a mile away is the one attraction that has nothing to do with cobbles: Castle Combe Circuit, laid out on a wartime airfield east of the village, which held its first race meeting in 1950 and its first international in 1955. Beyond race days it runs driving experiences, karting on selected dates, cycling and car-boot events, and much of the track can be watched from around its edge. Up on the estate above the village, the Manor House Golf Club offers an 18-hole parkland course open to visitors, on the same private land that hides the earthworks of the vanished castle.

That castle gave the village both half its name and most of its early history. It sat half a mile north-west of the Manor House, probably an Iron Age promontory fort reused after the Norman Conquest, and during the 12th-century Anarchy it became a ringwork stronghold with a mint before being abandoned in the 1300s; the "Castle" prefix appears in the records after about 1140. Its last stone tower came down in 1950. Domesday, which lists the place as "Come", records thirty-three households, three mills and a value of ten pounds. What made the medieval village rich was cloth. When Millicent Scrope married the soldier Sir John Fastolf, the manor spent twenty-two years supplying red and white cloth for his troops; the clothier William Heyne left two thousand pounds in 1435, and around fifty houses went up in the boom. Fastolf's money later paid for the church tower, begun in 1434, with its rich fan vault. The Market Cross, four stone piers under a pyramidal roof, was repaired in 1590; the timber market house that once stood beside it, where the parish met and brewed its church ale, was pulled down around 1840 to widen the road.

Beyond the Cobbles: Walks and Racing

The 20th century added the strangest chapter. In 1962 the village won a national "Prettiest Village" competition, and Country Life has more recently called it the "Platonic ideal of the Cotswolds village". Four years after that competition a film crew arrived, built a fishing harbour beside the By Brook, laid plastic cobbles over the real ones and turned the place into a seaport for Dr Dolittle, with Rex Harrison and Anthony Newley. It has since stood in for other places entirely: the town of Wall in Stardust, and the England of Spielberg's War Horse.

On a quiet morning, before the cars come down from Dunns Lane, the loudest thing in the village is the brook under the bridge, and the most commercial thing might be an honesty box of eggs on a cottage windowsill with a jar for the coins. These are homes, not a film set. That is worth remembering on the way down.