The Fox & Hounds sits at the top of the hill, which in Colerne means the top of a limestone spur 545 feet up, with the Box valley falling away below it. It is a traditional two-room pub, dog-friendly, with a beer garden and a fireplace set under a heavy timber lintel in the older part of the building. The house beer is Jaspers, brewed from St Austell's Cornish Best; Thatchers Dry and Cheddar Valley ciders are on as well. The pub is known for its fish dishes, fish and chips especially, and there is live music twice a month. One range of the building carries the date "J. T. 1752" in its stonework.
Down in the village, the Six Bells Inn is the other pub: one large bar with a real fire and a skittle alley. It does not run a kitchen in the usual sense. On a Saturday evening you may find a mobile pizza van, Only Fools & Morsels, parked outside; regulars carry the boxes in and eat them at the bar with a pint of Butcombe Original or Timothy Taylor Landlord. It's the kind of arrangement worth checking before you turn up. The building is mostly 17th century.
For everything else there is Lexies, the Premier shop at 8a Market Place, which carries fresh bread, fruit and vegetables, meat and poultry, frozen food and the papers. The Post Office is round on the High Street, handling parcels, banking and vehicle tax. The Community Café runs out of the old Victorian schoolrooms on Vicarage Lane, the same building that hosts the playgroup, the after-school club and a coffee morning.
The parish church, St John the Baptist, has a west tower that is 15th century, with a pierced stone parapet, corner pinnacles and a clock on the west face that has only one hand. Inside there is a fragment of a 9th-century cross, a figure of a saint carved around 1200, medieval glass, carved corbel heads, and the effigy of R. Walmesley, who died in 1893 and whose maker signed the work. The nave goes back to about 1200; Walter de Dunstanville began building the church in stone in 1190.
Walking starts from the Fox & Hounds door. The Colerne Heritage Trail is a 5.7-mile circuit on field paths and bridleways, moderate, with slopes, stiles and mud after rain, taking in the church, Euridge Manor, Colerne Down and the By Brook before dropping to Slaughterford and coming back. If you want more, the Corsham–Colerne Peacock Trail is a challenging circuit linking the two villages over nearly ten miles and 1,481 feet of climbing, with steep or rough sections and stiles along the way. Colerne Down is where, in the later 17th century, the antiquary John Aubrey found the locals "famous and frequent for playing stowball."
Families have Green Lane Recreation Ground, with a concrete skate area, a hillside slide, a zip line, four kinds of swing, a roundabout, basketball nets, football pitches and a French boules pitch. There are no public toilets there; the Old School, with its courtyard play equipment and benches, has toilets available when the hall is hired for events.
The hill has been lived on for a long time. Bury Wood Camp, a 32-acre Iron Age promontory fort, sits on the parish edge, and a Roman villa nearby had eleven rooms, three of them floored with mosaic. Colerne gained the right to hold a market around 1250, and New College, Oxford, owned the manor from 1388 until 1877. On 1 April 1774 a single day's fire destroyed 42 houses and dozens of outbuildings, leaving nearly sixty families homeless. Later the plateau acquired a different use: RAF Colerne opened in 1941; Hurricanes and Spitfires served there before the station closed in 1976.
The airfield left a smaller mark too. In October 1945 Iris Fuller began serving Sunday teas, chiefly to RAF personnel, at a place she called the Vineyard; within a few years it had a national name and a special Sunday bus, and in 1966 the comedian Ben Warris bought it.
Getting here means minor roads rather than a through-route. Bath Spa is the nearest station, about eight miles and twenty minutes by car, with Chippenham a little further. The Faresaver 228 runs into Bath, and Coachstyle's route 36 reaches Chippenham via Biddestone and Corsham, though both are limited enough to be worth checking first. Corsham lies three and a half miles east and Bath six to the south-west, with Dyrham Park and Lacock both nearby National Trust properties worth the detour.
The people who live here call it, without much elaboration, the village on the hill.
