Elmley Castle

The community inn

The Queen Elizabeth Inn stands on a broad open space at the foot of Main Street, believed to have served a weekly market held here from 1254. Thirty-six local shareholders bought the lease in 2014 and reopened the pub that December as a non-profit, by which point the two other pubs in Elmley Castle had already closed. A professional kitchen and front-of-house team run it, with fifteen to twenty volunteers keeping the back office going.

The food is described as homemade pub classics, locally sourced. A sample menu from September 2025 included lamb kofta albondigas in a spicy tomato sauce, braised lamb shank in minted gravy, a Cotswold venison and mushroom pie, a cauliflower, spinach and lentil pie, and Baileys crème brûlée, with a deli board named after the queen. Off the bar there is Tall Tales, the house ale from Butcombe, with guest ales that change barrel by barrel — Butty Bach and Ledbury Bitter have both featured.

Dogs are welcome in the bar, the café and the outside areas, where there is water and a supply of free biscuits, though not in the restaurant. One of the regulars is a dog called Maggie.

Tearoom, village and hill

Attached is Bessie's tearoom, which does cream teas, cakes, milkshakes and themed cupcakes, with a small sweet shop for children. The inn also runs a virtual village shop for staples and home delivery, and sells local ales, ciders and sparkling wine from Bredon Hill.

The main street is tree-lined and runs between black-and-white timbered cottages and older red-brick ones. Above them is Bredon Hill, on whose northern slopes the village sits. Off Kersoe Lane there is a small free picnic place, with a brook down one side and wildlife-rich woodland beside it.

The Bredon Hill circular starts and ends at the inn: 6.2 miles, about three hours, with 250 metres of climbing through fields and woodland, across the ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort, past Parson's Folly and the Banbury Stone. The summit is 299 metres, with views towards the Malverns. There are stiles and fields of livestock, so it is not a stroll. For something shorter, Mary Mackenzie's village history walk links the medieval market space, the Old College, the old cloisters, the market cross, the former mill pond and the cricket field before returning to St Mary's.

Church and castle

St Mary's is Grade I, with fabric spanning the eleventh century to the seventeenth. Herringbone masonry in the walls points to a date before 1100; the tower base and south aisle are thirteenth-century, the north transept mid-fourteenth. Inside are a rare two-phase medieval font, a very complete set of late-medieval benches, and three alabaster effigies of the Savage family, who died in 1616, 1631 and 1674. Above them hangs Sir Giles Savage's funeral helmet, topped with a unicorn crest. A fourth monument, to Thomas, first Earl of Coventry, was made for Croome d'Abitot and ended up here instead after a family dispute. Pevsner called the principal monuments "amongst the best of their dates in the county."

The castle that gives the village its name survives mainly as earthworks, comparatively well preserved for their kind. They lie about half a mile south-west of the church: two Iron Age hillforts overlaid with a medieval ringwork and bailey, the ringwork raised by Robert Despenser around 1080. In 1317 Hugh le Despenser was ordered to garrison it with twenty footmen; four years later rebel barons took it and did considerable damage. In August 1575 Elizabeth I stayed with Sir William Savage and his wife at the village mansion from the 20th to the 22nd; the pub's name and sign commemorate the visit.

Domesday and the Turnip Field

In 1086 the Domesday surveyors valued the manor at seven pounds a year, up from six twenty years earlier, in an entry that also names neighbouring Charlton. The Bishop of Worcester held it, and the working lord was recorded as Robert the bursar.

The recreation ground began as the Turnip Field, given to the village in 1932 by Ernest Stevens of nearby Chapel Farm; there is a children's playground on it now. The cricket club runs senior sides and junior teams down to under-nines, with Bredon Hill rising behind the outfield.

Getting here and summer cricket

Evesham station is roughly four miles off and Pershore about four and a half, an unstaffed stop on the Cotswold Line between London and Hereford. The village is reached on minor roads, and the 565 Village Hopper calls at the inn a few times a day between Evesham and Pershore, Monday to Saturday; it is worth checking the times before you rely on it.

On summer Fridays the junior cricketers train beneath the hill, coached by ECB-qualified coaches.