Churchill

The Chequers and village essentials

The Chequers sits on Church Road with flagstone floors, wooden beams, an open fire and a dartboard, opposite the cluster of church, green and honey-coloured houses that makes up the centre of the village. It is a gastropub with a relaxed atmosphere and a food-led offer. Dogs are welcome and there is a treat jar by the front door; in warmer weather a garden terrace of about ten tables is used for outdoor tables. The kitchen runs to smoked cod's-roe crumpet, devilled kidneys on sourdough, and a twice-baked cheddar souffle with spinach and grain mustard. Sunday brings roasts of Hereford sirloin, pork loin and belly, or corn-fed chicken. There is beer-battered cod with triple-cooked chips, monkfish scampi, and a green orzo with asparagus and English burrata for anyone stepping around the meat. Cotswold Lager and Shagweaver Golden Ale are both brewed locally.

There is no independent shop, butcher, bakery, deli or farm shop in Churchill itself; Kingham, about two miles off, has the nearest station.

Fountain, squire and landmark church

The other thing you cannot miss is the Langston Memorial Fountain. Erected in 1870 for Julia, Countess of Ducie, in memory of her father, it is an elaborate Tudor-Gothic limestone tower with pinnacles, flying buttresses and heraldic shields, set in a polished-granite basin and spouting water into a trough. Pevsner called it "hideously ugly." Betjeman is said to have liked it.

The father in question was James Haughton Langston, the Squire of Churchill, who inherited the Sarsden estate at sixteen, had Humphry Repton landscape its grounds, and later sat as MP for Oxford. He funded the parish church outright, for at least fourteen thousand pounds. That church, All Saints, was built in 1826 and consecrated the following year, replacing a medieval one lower down Hastings Hill. Its west tower is a two-thirds-scale copy of Magdalen College tower and stands as a landmark for miles. Inside, the five-bay hammer-beam nave roof is modelled on the hall at Christ Church, and the fittings run from 1826 Gothic benches and a barrel-organ drum to a Jacobean chest and Clayton & Bell chancel decoration added in 1884.

Fire, the lost village and famous sons

The reason the church stands where it does, well uphill from the old one, goes back to a fire on 30 July 1684 that destroyed at least fifteen houses and possibly twenty, roughly a quarter to a third of the settlement. The village rebuilt itself higher up the slope, and the earthworks around the medieval church still trace the outline of the lower village that was left behind. The old church's surviving chancel became the Churchill and Sarsden Heritage Centre in 2001, where touchscreen displays tell the stories of the village's better-known sons. Access is limited and there are no toilets.

Two of those sons account for most of the centre's material. William Smith, born here in 1769 to the village blacksmith, gathered local echinoid fossils that people called poundstones, worked out the principle of faunal succession, and in 1815 published a geological map of England, Wales and part of Scotland. Warren Hastings was born in 1732 at what is now the private Hastings House on Hastings Hill; he became the first Governor-General of India, was impeached in 1787, and was acquitted after a trial that ran seven years.

Walking the Evenlode hilltop and getting here

The village sits on a hilltop finger of land between two tributary valleys of the Evenlode, which makes for good walking. A guided route of about four and a half miles starts at the church and works through woodland and field paths back to it. A longer one links Kingham and Chipping Norton and passes along the trackbed of the old branch railway, which carried passengers until 1962 and closed entirely in 1964. The Oolitic limestone walls and Stonesfield-slate roofs give the whole place its honey colour, and from the higher ground the views run a long way.

Churchill is on the B4450, three miles from Chipping Norton and five from Stow-on-the-Wold. Kingham station, managed by GWR, sends trains east towards Oxford and London and west towards Worcester. Buses are thin: the Villager V9 calls at the Memorial on Fridays only, so plan around a car.

Play beside the village hall

Next to the village hall on Church Road there is a children's play area and a playing field, a plain green space where a child can spend an afternoon without much encouragement.