Behind The Green, on the recreation ground, there are swings, a picnic table, table tennis, and football and rugby posts, with open fields beyond and views that run off toward the Wychwood villages. This is Fifield, a limestone village. It tells you what to expect: a place that sends you out to walk.
The village pub, the Cotswold Merrymouth, stands on the A424 at the edge of the village. It is worth knowing before you arrive that its daily pub and restaurant trade is closed for renovation. Food and drink now come with events — Cotswold Blues Club nights, darts, quizzes — so the kitchen cooks on those evenings rather than every day. When it does open, the range is wide: homemade beef chilli with basmati rice and garlic bread, Keralan chicken curry with naan and mango chutney, stone-baked pizzas, jacket potatoes, pan-fried salmon with tenderstem broccoli and hollandaise, and Hook Norton beer-battered fish and chips. There are three pet-friendly rooms, a garden and courtyard, and a children's play area. Check what's on before you count on a meal there.
For everyday eating you look to the neighbours, most of them within walking distance or a short drive. The King's Head at Bledington sits on the village green beside a brook, pours four rotating guest ales, and cooks traditional and modern British food from mainly local ingredients. The Hare, across the fields at Milton-under-Wychwood, is known for fresh fish and seafood specials, and it is where the main waymarked walk here starts and ends. The Feathered Nest at Nether Westcote has outdoor seating that looks over the Evenlode Valley.
There is no shop in Fifield itself. Rise and Flour, a sourdough bakery and café at Milton-under-Wychwood, does sit-in and takeaway food and the occasional pizza evening. Bruern Farm Shop and Café sells vegetable boxes and has a café attached. The community shop at Bledington keeps groceries, meat and alcohol, with most vegetables sourced locally, and serves soup, savouries and cake.
The walking is the reason to stay. An easy six-mile circular links Milton-under-Wychwood and Fifield, following streams and footbridges and the D'Arcy Dalton Way through the village, with a two-mile extension that passes the Merrymouth toward the edge of the old Rissington airfield. Closer to the door, a 5.8-kilometre loop runs from The Green out through farmland to Foxholes, a 23-hectare stretch of ancient woodland where BBOWT waymarks a 1.75-mile circular. The reserve is best in May for bluebells and has recorded more than 200 species of fungi, seven kinds of bat including Bechstein's, and 23 butterflies. Paths in every direction turn muddy in winter, and wellingtons are worth packing.
St John the Baptist is early thirteenth century, with a fourteenth-century tower and porch. The narrow octagonal tower carries a contemporary stone spire; the porch has a massive stone-slab roof, crenellated sides and carved heads. Inside are a fifteenth-century octagonal font, fragments of medieval glass, an 1852 east window by William Wailes, and a brass to Mary Bray, who died in 1620, and her nine children. A datestone at the base of the spire reads 1699. The church is usually open outside services and stays cool through a hot afternoon.
The oldest thing in the parish sits on the Gloucestershire boundary: a Neolithic long barrow, a mound 48 metres long and still nearly two metres high, which a 1934 dig found to contain a stone passage and burial chamber. During the war a brick bomb shelter was built into its north-west side, and it is still there.
Kingham station is under four miles off, with trains to Oxford, Worcester and London Paddington; Burford lies about four miles south and Stow roughly four to six miles. In the 1920s the head teacher of the Idbury and Fifield school, Jessie Jones, sent her pupils out to map the fields, springs and old field strips around them, and wrote down why. "Have you ever longed to go away with other lucky children? We have. So we made up a lovely game years ago in our village. We will call it 'Exploring.'" It is still the right instruction here.
