Cherington

Village life without a pub

Three roads meet at a small green — the ways in from Tetbury, Minchinhampton and Cirencester — and that is more or less the whole of the village centre. About a hundred and ten people live in Cherington, counting the outlying farms and houses, on high ground four miles north-east of Tetbury.

You should know before you book that the village has no pub. The last one was a beerhouse that traded as the Yew Tree and then the Cherington Inn; it closed in July 1988 and became a private house after a petition of 150 signatures failed to save it. "I do not think there is a future for the pub," said Councillor Jo Clark during the debate over the conversion.

Food stops and country walking

So the food is a short drive away, and the nearest reason to make it is Jolly Nice at Frampton Mansell, a farm shop, café and bar just off the A419 that buys from more than seventy small local producers. The kitchen does a native-breed beef burger with local bacon and Dorset Coastal cheddar, a buttermilk-fried pheasant burger they call the KFP, pulled-pork loaded fries, and a cauliflower plate with ras el hanout chickpeas and tahini, with Stroud Brewery beers and Dunkertons cider on tap. Butchery-made sausage rolls and Scotch eggs travel well if you are walking afterwards. Tetbury, four miles off, supplies the rest: butchers, bakers and food shops along Long Street and Church Street, and markets under the old Market House on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Walking is the real amenity here. The Gloucestershire Way, a hundred-mile route, passes through the parish on its line between Sapperton, Tarlton, Avening and Westonbirt; an OS map will show you where to pick it up for a walk out into open Cotswold country. Avening itself, about a mile and a half west and down in its valley, publishes a set of circular walks and makes a good objective on foot. The old ground around Cherington was downland — arid and stony, good for sheep — with better pasture and water meadow along the Avening stream below.

St Nicholas and Cherington Park

The church of St Nicholas stands near the middle and is worth going in. It is Grade I, twelfth-century in origin, with a chancel rebuilt in the mid-thirteenth. The Norman work that survives is the font, a piscina and a carved tympanum over the north doorway; inside there are Early English lancets in the chancel, plate tracery in the east window, faded wall painting in the south transept, an eighteenth-century communion rail and a crowd of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monuments. The nave roof was repitched around 1500, its carved struts sitting on stone corbels.

Cherington Park, private and set back from the road, is the other large building. John Neale built the house around 1740; it was enlarged in the nineteenth century and partly demolished in 1955, when its interior was largely remodelled. A Norman tympanum, thought to have come out of the church in the early nineteenth century, is set under an oriel window in its Gothic wing.

Agricultural history and getting here

The rest of the history is agricultural and mostly quiet. Domesday recorded the place as Cerintone: twenty-three households, four acres of meadow, one mill, valued at four pounds. That mill stood on the Avening stream and worked, under the names Ball's Mill and Nag's Head Mill, until about 1919; by the 1970s the buildings were gone and the pond had been grassed over. Cloth once mattered here — of thirty-five men listed in 1608, twelve were in the trade — but no clothworkers appear after the early seventeenth century. The open fields were divided and enclosed under a private Act in 1730, across some 2,200 acres, with Cherington Down as the principal common pasture.

Getting here is a matter of minor roads converging on that green; the A433 Tetbury–Cirencester road passes through the wider parish a couple of miles south. Kemble, about five miles off, is the nearest station, with parking and toilets, managed by Great Western Railway. The county's Robin service will collect you if you book it ahead by phone, website or app.

The annual Cherington Show

The one fixed date the village keeps is the Cherington Show, held every year since 1945. Produce and craft stalls fill the hall, flowers go on display inside the church, and there is a dog show and a bouncy castle for the children, with the takings split between the church and the village hall.