Ebrington

Pub cooking and farm produce

The Ebrington Arms has five bedrooms above it and a kitchen built around pub classics and more crafted cooking. The main menu runs to Devon crab on a sourdough crumpet with brown-butter fennel, pork belly with apricot compote, grilled gem, mustard seed and crackling, and red snapper with wild rice, a vegetable bisque and sea herbs; it also does beer-battered fish and chips. On Sundays there are roasts to choose between — chicken breast with garlic, tarragon and mint, confit pork belly, rump of beef — brought out with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, gravy and garden greens. There is a landscaped terrace and garden for the weather that allows it. The building has been a pub for more than two hundred years.

A short way off, Vegetable Matters sells seasonal produce, much of it grown on Drinkwater Farm. Pete and Amanda Drinkwater opened the shop in 2017, though the family has been working these hills far longer: Doug Drinkwater Senior came back from the war in 1947 and started with a few acres of sprouts. The shelves carry seasonal fruit and vegetables, much of it from the Ebrington fields, alongside daily bread and milk, pickles, jams, honey, chutneys, oils, vinegars and dressings.

A butcher works from the same site — Fresh Meat Matters, run by Robbie Walker, who keeps a second shop, R & D Walker, over in Moreton-in-Marsh. The meat is mostly local. A fishmonger from Grimsby comes once a week, and on chosen summer days an ice-cream van turns up.

A wardens’ walk and Norman church

For a walk, the Cotswold wardens' circuit called On the Edge at Ebrington starts from the small car park off May Lane, behind the pub. It is 6.5 miles and takes three hours or so, climbing gradually past Foxcote Manor to open views beyond Ilmington into Warwickshire and along the ridge towards Hidcote. The tracks are firm but unsurfaced.

St Eadburgha's stands on one of the highest points in the village, its short tower still a landmark among the surrounding trees. The nave and north and south doors are Norman, the south porch, aisle and chancel thirteenth-century, and the tower Perpendicular. The south doorway has three orders of chevron moulding, and an early oak door is held shut by an iron bar close to two metres long. Inside there is a fifteenth-century octagonal font on thirteenth-century steps, a carved pulpit and tester dated 1679, and fragments of sixteenth-century English and Flemish glass.

Blind clock, bells and church stories

The tower clock has no face. It is attributed to a village blacksmith working around 1748, and its mechanisms are still wound by hand each day, roughly a hundred pulls on each windlass. Six bells hang above, five of them cast in the seventeenth century by the travelling Bagley family; the earliest carries the line "William Bagley made mee - 1642".

The church holds two stories worth pausing over. Sir John Fortescue, a Lancastrian Lord Chief Justice, was pardoned by Edward IV after the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 and came back to Ebrington; his monument shows him in legal robes. The Keyt family are here too — Sir John Keyte raised a troop of horse for Charles I at his own expense and was made a baronet after the Restoration. A plaque records the Cow Charity: from 1632, William Keyte left the poor the milk of ten cows between 10 May and 1 November each year. Wartime rationing made it unworkable, and in 1952 it was turned into a money trust, which still exists.

Domesday and village traditions

The Domesday commissioners found thirty-three households, two mills worth fifteen shillings, and put the manor's value at seven pounds a year, down from twelve in 1066.

Village life keeps its own calendar: a cricket green and team, a summer fete, carol singing at Christmas, and a point-to-point on the Easter bank holiday. The village hall has been going since 1958.

Getting there and the village calendar

Ebrington sits about two and a half miles from both Chipping Campden and Mickleton, reached on local roads. The volunteer-run Hedgehog bus calls at the village hall on some days, running to Stratford and Moreton-in-Marsh; it is worth checking the timetable before relying on it. Hidcote and Kiftsgate, two very different gardens, are nearby.

On St Thomas's Day, the shortest of the year, the bells are rung at dawn.