The cottages climb. Chalford's houses are stacked up the steep side of the Frome valley, weavers' terraces of Cotswold stone linked by narrow paths that thread between them, and from the railway line on the valley floor the effect has long been called Alpine. The valley bottom is where everything runs together: the River Frome, the partly restored Thames and Severn Canal, the A419 and the Golden Valley railway all squeezed into parallel corridors beneath the houses.
Start at Chalford Community Stores on the High Street. It is owned by the village and run by volunteers, and it does the work of both shop and post office: fresh food, everyday groceries, newspapers, local produce down to organic vegetables, and a shelf of things made by people who live here, sold under the name Made in Chalford. For a village pinned to a hillside, having a shop at all is not to be taken for granted.
Opposite the stores is the New Red Lion, a family-run free house. The building went up in the early 1700s and became a pub when the Thames and Severn Canal company bought it while cutting the canal through the valley. The present owners took it on as a free house in 1991 and moved in the following May, and they put the emphasis on real ales and home cooking. Up on Chalford Hill, at Midway, the Old Neighbourhood Inn keeps a traditional bar and a separate dining room, with an à-la-carte menu, a garden menu, bar snacks and a Sunday lunch. Its beer garden is a large one, which up here means a view as much as a lawn. It was once the Mechanics Arms, one of many pubs the village has lost.
That loss is worth a moment. "We had 9 pubs and 9 churches," recalls John Hemmings, born in 1936, in the parish's oral-history collection. The vanished names are still remembered locally: the Companies Arms, the Valley Inn, the Anchor, the Bell Hotel, the Fleece, the Wheatsheaf and more. One of them, the Old Company's Arms, closed in 1964 and later became Chalford Place, a private house rescued from semi-dereliction and finished with Damien Hirst's motifs.
The walking is the reason many people come. A level circuit of about two and a half miles follows the Golden Valley beyond the High Street with a single stile. The Dimmel's Dale and Rack Hill round is a similar length, stile-free apart from one steepish paved descent, and takes in woods, streams, canal and the Frome. A longer three-mile loop through France Lynch and Strawberry Banks adds climbs, stream crossings and, in season, orchids, bluebells and butterflies. For a flatter day, the towpath runs about 3.2 miles from Bell Lock at the foot of Cowcombe Hill towards the Sapperton Tunnel, where the canal slips into quieter country above Valley Lock.
Rack Hill is named for the racks that once held cloth stretched on tenterhooks to dry. Chalford began at the ford where a drovers' road crossed the fast Frome, and the springs and water power turned it into a valley of mills; at the height of the trade as many as nineteen stood between Ashmeads and St Mary's. Donkeys carried wool, cloth, bread and coal along the paths, which earned the place the nickname Neddyshire, a practice that survived into the 1930s and was briefly revived by one resident for shop deliveries.
Christ Church, above the valley, was built in 1725 as a chapel of ease and grew through the nineteenth century into a limestone Neo-Norman church with a squat tile-hung spire. Inside is a quiet gathering of Arts and Crafts work: an openwork choir screen and organ-loft panelling by Norman Jewson, a Peter Waals lectern inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, and a font carved with fish by William Simmonds.
Stroud, with its free Museum in the Park, is about four miles off along the A419; Cirencester lies eight miles east; and the Stagecoach C67 links the two through the village. The nearest trains are at Stroud now, Chalford's own station having closed in 1964.
Down by the water at Valley Corner there are swings, a zip wire and an outdoor table-tennis table, with the canal, the road and the old railway line running on past in a row.
