Daylesford

Farmshop and field-to-fork dining

The vegetables come from the market garden, the cheese is made in a creamery on the site, and there are wines from the sister estate, Château Léoube. Daylesford Farm has grown organic food here since 1977, and the farm shop it feeds is a major draw for visitors. Alongside the produce, breads and pastries there is home-and-garden retail, a wine stall and, next door, the Bamford Wellness Spa. Daylesford Organic, Daylesford Farm and Bamford became B Corps in 2023.

Eating is the point of a visit as much as shopping. The Trough is the farm's café and restaurant, and it has held a Michelin Green Star for a fourth year. Its menu leans on what the garden and creamery produce: sourdough with whipped herb butter, flat-iron chicken with kale, heritage apples, cranberries and pecans, a Cotswold chopped salad with chicken, Cheddar, the farm's own hen's egg and ham, and a slow-roast tomato and sweetcorn tart with Adlestrop cheese.

Pizza, pasta and practical cookery

For something more casual, the Old Spot does pasta and wood-fired pizza. There is ox-cheek cannelloni in roast-tomato sauce, saddleback-pork tortellini in brodo with chilli, peas and broad beans, linguine alla Nerano, and a Fiorentina pizza topped with a hen's egg and spinach. Children get penne and a tomato-and-mozzarella pizza. Dogs are welcome in the Farmshop and the outdoor areas on leads, but not inside the Trough.

The Cookery School runs adult courses through the seasons and children's sessions in the school holidays, including a Junior Chefs class for nine- to thirteen-year-olds that starts with a tour of the thirty-two-acre market garden and ends with everyone tasting what they cooked. These are booked in advance rather than wandered into.

Signed walks and a Lower Oddington pub

There is no pub in the hamlet itself. Signed walks start in the field opposite the Farmshop and spa car park and run year-round across organic farmland, through woods and over the River Evenlode. Kingham is about forty minutes away by bridleway, ending at the Wild Rabbit on Church Street; Lower Oddington is roughly two hours and passes its church and the Fox. The paths cross a working farm and can be rough, flooded and extremely muddy, which may make them unsuitable for pushchairs, especially after rain. Dogs stay on leads throughout.

The Fox at Lower Oddington is worth the walk. It is a seventeenth-century stone pub, recorded as one since 1856, with a bar, a Saddle Room and a walled garden. The kitchen cooks with Daylesford ingredients: Wootton chicken-liver parfait with Daylesford brioche and apricot chutney, chargrilled harissa chicken with romesco, leeks and smoked almonds, a Tamworth pork cutlet, orzo primavera, a double cheeseburger and Diavolo and Afumado sourdough pizzas. Timothy Taylor's Landlord and Allsopp's Best Bitter are on the cask. Dogs are allowed everywhere inside. In 1862 the premises had five rooms, a parlour, a shop, a carriage house and a skittle alley, and it still keeps its mullioned windows, an ironstone barrel-vaulted cellar and a set of scratched witch marks.

Estate church and the Hastings legacy

The village around all this is small and strongly shaped by the estate: a group of Tudor-Gothic limestone cottages built for tenants in 1868, park gates, farmland and a church. The Church of St Peter was built in 1860 by J. L. Pearson for the estate owner Harman Grisewood, a compact French Gothic Revival building with a central tower and stone spire. Inside are stained glass by Wailes and by Clayton & Bell, marble mosaics, a ten-sided stone font and an ornate biblical pulpit; a thirteenth-century door surround and a twelfth-century arch survive from earlier churches on the ground. It is currently on the Heritage at Risk register, so it is best not to count on getting in.

The name behind most of this is Warren Hastings, Governor-General of British India from 1773 to 1784, who bought back his family's lost estate in 1788 and built Daylesford House with the architect S. P. Cockerell. His white-marble memorial is in the church and his grave lies in the churchyard. Daylesford was a detached piece of Worcestershire until 1931, and only then became part of Gloucestershire.

Getting there, with one last surprise

Daylesford lies south of the A436; Kingham station is about 2.6 miles away, with Stow-on-the-Wold six kilometres to the west, and the Villager V6 bus runs on Thursdays only, so a car makes life easier. Hastings, in his first month back, wrote that he had "made my own plan for Kitchen Garden, shrubbery and other improvements." He also kept a yak in the park, and had George Stubbs paint it.