Ford

The White Hart beside the Bybrook

The White Hart's cobbled garden terrace sits beside the Bybrook. Trees shade part of it, while other corners catch the sun. In summer, the garden Burger Shack serves double beef burgers, southern-fried chicken, bratwurst dogs and loaded fries.

Inside, the kitchen has a broader menu. It names Chalkstream trout salad with salsa verde and pickled shallots, Somerset pork ribeye, Brixham hake with tomato, broad bean and radish, a chicken and woodland-herb pie, and cyder-battered haddock and chips. A vegetarian main is heritage tomato and basil risotto. Sunday brings roasts: Longhorn beef rump, chicken supreme, pork belly, or a mushroom, spinach and vegan-feta pie.

For a stop in Ford, the inn offers food and eleven bedrooms; bring any other essentials with you. Landlord Tamas and his team welcome visitors. Dogs are welcome on leads in the shared areas, and the bedrooms take up to two of them.

The coaching inn and valley hamlet

The White Hart is a Tudor coaching inn with listed fabric from the seventeenth century, possibly on an older core, and a south range added in the early nineteenth. Inside are mullioned windows and a Tudor-arched stone fireplace carved with the date 1553, though the carving itself is a twentieth-century addition.

Ford is small and spread out, a hamlet in a wooded valley bottom where brooks meet. Stone cottages and former industrial buildings line the water, most of them now homes. The A420 runs straight through the middle, which keeps the place connected.

Woodland circuits and vanished mills

The area is well suited to walking. A four-mile circuit from Castle Combe follows the Macmillan Way through woods to Long Dean and down to Ford, then returns along the far bank of the Bybrook through beech woods; it is stile-free, though not flat. A slightly longer version passes the limestone grassland of Danks Down, where walkers may see marsh tits, woodpeckers, little owls and buzzards. Nearby Long Dean is a pretty group of mill and 18th-century cottages in a combe.

The mills came first. One, probably both, of North Wraxall's two Domesday mills were probably at Ford, grinding corn; at least one likely turned to fulling cloth in the Middle Ages, went back to corn around 1800 when steam arrived, and disappeared as local industry ebbed by the early twentieth century. The brooks meeting here were the point of the place. The name, written Forde in 1249, is simply the crossing through the water.

Roman Ford and the former church

Older still is Truckle Hill, where a Roman villa was uncovered in 1859. The field was called Coffin Ground after a stone sarcophagus found there; removing it led to the discovery of a villa with 16 rooms and passages. Five hypocaust-heated rooms appear to have formed a bath area, with two furnaces and adjoining sweating baths. Finds included coins, spoons, rings, a hairpin and a rare glass funnel.

The former Church of St John the Evangelist is a private house now, converted in 2001, so you see it only from outside. C. E. Ponting built it in 1896 with the nave floor sloping to follow the hillside, so that all 170 worshippers had a clear view of the Communion Table. Lord Methuen gave the land, and Francis Harrison paid £2,100 of the £3,000 it cost. A statue of St John still stands in a niche in the south wall.

Castle Combe and the continuing Bybrook

Castle Combe is five minutes away by car, with its market cross, its bridge over the Bybrook and the faceless clock in St Andrew's; the centre fills up, so go early or late. The motor circuit, running since 1950, is about a seven-minute drive from the inn. Chippenham is the nearest station. Buses through Ford are sparse.

The Bybrook keeps going past the terrace.