Chadlington

The Tite Inn and Chadlington Brewery

The Tite Inn sits at Mill End, and it is the last pub standing in a village that once had several. It is a country inn with a bar, a restaurant and a large garden, and it welcomes dogs. The kitchen leans on fresh, local and seasonal cooking, which changes through the year but has run to Chadlington beer-battered haddock with chips, minted peas and homemade tartare; a stacked beef burger; mixed mushroom risotto with Parmesan and truffle oil; bangers and mash; and a Guinness sticky-toffee pudding. The ales behind the bar are brewed less than a mile away.

That brewery is worth the short walk. Chadlington Brewery works out of a converted farm building at Blaythorne Farm, has been going since 2014, and styles itself the Oxford Beer. The beers are gluten-free, made with filtered local spring water and English hops and malt; the farm runs on solar and biomass, and the spent grain goes to nearby farmers as feed. Small-group tours, led by the brewer Ant, take you round the kit, include a tasting, and finish with a walk to the Tite.

Village Shops and Five Ends

For daily supplies, the village keeps three things going that many places this size have lost. Cafe de la Post is café and convenience store both, and the daily centre for news; Tracy runs the newspaper round to Chadlington and the villages around it in an electric Renault Zoe. It bakes its own bread and sells gluten-free brownies, carrot cake, homemade scones with strawberry jam, Cotswold free-range eggs, New Ground coffee, household basics, English wine and Saturday takeaway pizzas. A few doors on, Chadlington Quality Foods faced closure in 2001, and villagers made a plan to keep it running; it runs a cheese counter and deli, sells fruit and vegetables from local growers, and makes its own cakes, jams and chutneys in a kitchen on site. In the same building is Slatters, the butcher, now run by Patrick Strainge of Bampton, with Ollie Weaver managing and long-serving Chris still on the counter: local meat, seasonal game, pies, barbecue cuts and Christmas turkeys.

The village itself is not one place but five. Chadlington is strung along a south-facing slope above the Evenlode Valley, and its East, West, Brook, Green and Mill Ends stay separated by open fields, each probably having grown up around its own farmstead. It gives the place a scattered, farmed character rather than a single centre, and it means a walk between two parts of the village can take you through open countryside.

Walking and Medieval Stonework

There is a good deal of that to be had. The official Chadlington, Spelsbury and Beyond circular runs 8.5 miles, climbing to the old Salt Way, crossing fields and working woodland, passing a megalith and dropping back towards the Evenlode. Reckon on about four and a half hours, a moderate amount of fitness, and the odd steep slope. The Church of St Nicholas is worth finding: late twelfth-century in origin, and possibly earlier, restored by Charles Buckeridge in 1870, with a round-arched south doorway, carved heads and gargoyles along its parapets, and among them a fine green man.

Domesday, Civil War and the Mills

History here is quieter than the buildings suggest. The Domesday surveyors valued the whole settlement at four pounds. During the Civil War, residents complained of the "extraordinary plundering" of most of the town by billeted cavalry and petitioned for lower weekly contributions; a Royalist sword turned up much later, hidden in the thatch of a Brook End cottage. Two watermills, only about two hundred metres apart, ground here from the Middle Ages until the 1840s, and the last dairy herd was milked at Blaythorne in 1999.

Rail, Market Town and Brook Run

Charlbury station is about three miles south-east on the Great Western line, and Chipping Norton, with its theatre, museum and seasonal outdoor lido, is about three and a half miles north-east; the Pulhams X9 links the village to both. Most years, in the days after Christmas, the village runs the Great Brook Run, a cross-country race of just over a mile that is half across muddy fields and half through the brook itself, before everyone retreats to the Tite to dry out.