Cold Aston

A High Village in Waiting

A notice in the window of the Plough Inn reads "Opening Soon." The seventeenth-century inn stands near the centre of Cold Aston, limestone rubble under a stone-slate roof, its mullioned windows facing the lane. John and Tiffany have signed the notice, and the plan behind it is a country pub with seasonal food and four rooms to stay in. For now the building waits, currently advertised as Opening Soon.

The village around it is high and quiet, reached by single-track lanes that climb onto the wolds. The ground rises from around 476 feet in the valleys to over 689 feet in the west, open rolling farmland most of the way, and in winter the streams here can drop out of sight underground at a place called Broadwater Bottom.

Farm Provisions and Wold Paths

Homegrown at Hampen sells meat, vegetables, wool products and flour milled from heritage wheat, and Fir Farm runs milk dispensers filled with pasteurised, unhomogenised milk from its Red Poll herd; you bring your own bottle and fill it.

Walking is a major attraction here. A 6.5-mile circuit starts near the Plough, following a track to Turkdean, crossing undulating country to Notgrove, and returning to Cold Aston along the Gloucestershire Way; allow about three and a half hours. Shorter loops can be pieced together from the same footpaths and bridleways. East of Camp Farm, on a ridge above the Windrush valley, a Neolithic long barrow survives as a rectangular mound some 36 metres long.

Stonework and Aston Blank

St Andrew's is worth the few minutes it takes to look at properly. The nave and chancel are Norman; the Perpendicular west tower came later, and David Verey called it "very good." The south doorway keeps a richly carved Norman arch and a honeycombed tympanum, and fragments reset in the porch include what may be a Saxon cross-shaft carved with intertwined serpents. Inside there is a fourteenth-century stone reredos, an Easter sepulchre, a tower vault resting on angel corbels, and a Baroque monument to Giles Carter, who died in 1664. It is one of a very small number of churches in Gloucestershire with no east window.

The name has moved back and forth. Around 740, Æthelbald of Mercia granted land here to Osred of the Hwicce, and the estate later passed to the church of Worcester. Much later the manor lord Robert Blanc seems to have lent his surname to Aston Blank, though the villagers went on saying Cold Aston until the official name reverted in 1972. A 1752 estate map shows the place ringed by four open fields and hundreds of narrow strips; enclosure came in 1796. The old pub, the Keeper's Arms, opened by the 1840s and closed in 1959; a picnic there in 1863 ended when a disturbance broke out and a village constable, Ambrose Whitman, was assaulted.

Village Life and Wider Days

The village hall, opened in 1926, is an active community venue now — exercise classes, exhibitions, private hire — and has twice stood in for somewhere else on television, playing Kembleford's hall in Father Brown and later turning up in Sister Boniface. The Cold Aston Fayre takes over the village on the first Saturday in August.

The nearest railway station is Kingham, about eight miles off, with Moreton-in-Marsh a further option on the Cotswold Line. The Pulhams 832 bus calls at the Plough stop on Wednesdays only, running to Notgrove, Turkdean and Andoversford, where it connects onward to Cheltenham on the 801; a car may be easier the rest of the week. Bourton-on-the-Water is three miles away, with its bridges over the Windrush, Birdland, the scale model village and the motoring museum; Chedworth Roman Villa, with its mosaics and bath-house rooms, fills a half-day if the weather turns.

The Last Wash at Town Well

Until 1951 the village drew its water from springs and wells, and the washing was still being done at the Town Well.