The White Hart's terrace is cobbled and runs down to the Bybrook, close enough to the water that you can hear it. Trees give shade, and a few corners keep the sun for the rest of the afternoon. In summer a Burger Shack opens in the garden, doing beef burgers, southern-fried chicken, bratwurst dogs and loaded fries — the sort of thing you eat with a drink while the children run off the last of the day.
Inside, the kitchen is more ambitious than the garden suggests. The menu 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. There is a wild-garlic, spinach and ricotta risotto for anyone off the meat. Sunday brings roasts: Longhorn beef rump, chicken supreme, pork belly, or a mushroom, spinach and vegan-feta pie.
Ford has no shop of its own, and the White Hart is its main hub — one inn, eleven bedrooms — so bring what you need or drive for it. The landlord is Tamas. Dogs are welcome on leads in the shared areas, and the bedrooms take up to two of them.
The building calls itself a Tudor coaching inn. The listed fabric is seventeenth-century, perhaps on an older core, with 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.
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 the route suggests looking for marsh tits, woodpeckers, little owls and buzzards. Pevsner is said to have described nearby Long Dean as "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.
Older still is Truckle Hill, where a Roman villa was dug out in 1859. The field had long been called Coffin Ground, after a stone sarcophagus once turned up in it; lifting the coffin exposed the villa beneath — five small rooms with underfloor heating, two furnaces, sweating baths, and a scatter of 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 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 further. Chippenham is the nearest station. Buses through Ford are sparse, so check the current timetable before you rely on one.
The Bybrook keeps going past the terrace.
