Fulbrook

A Free House with an Ambitious Kitchen

The Carpenters Arms sits in Fulbrook, a short walk from Burford, run by Tom and Siobhan, who met working in hotels and restaurants and now run it as a free house. Tom cooked at Humphreys at Stoke Park before this, and it shows in a kitchen careful enough to label its own menus as samples and warn that the thing you fancied last week may not be on today.

When the sample Sunday menu runs in full it moves from wild-mushroom arancini with confit-garlic aioli through pan-fried king scallops with roasted-red-pepper tapenade, sea-buckthorn gel and dill, to a butternut-squash, wild-mushroom and spinach Wellington. There is Longhorn rump of beef and Cotswold pork loin for anyone who wants the plain version of Sunday, and afterwards sticky-toffee pudding or a banoffee pie assembled from banana crémeux, caramelised banana, milk-chocolate ice cream and rum caramel.

Family Welcome and the Burford Link

The garden is large, with a play area at one end, and dogs are welcome. The bar keeps two or three changing cask ales rather than anything you can plan a visit around, and there is a real fire, a children's menu and a quiz on Wednesdays. The bathrooms run to baby-changing, potty seats and small steps, which settles any question about who the pub is for.

For shops and more food options, you walk to Burford, a mile off with the River Windrush lying between the two. It is a genuine walk rather than a drive. The market town has a steep historic High Street, independent shops, antiques and galleries, and the Tolsey Museum in a sixteenth-century former merchants' meeting place.

Walking Country and Romanesque Stone

For a longer outing, the Swinbrook and Fulbrook Circular runs 4.4 miles with about 610 feet of climbing, usually reckoned at two to two-and-a-half hours. It crosses woodland and open country with river views, and the ground can be muddy; the waymarking is imperfect and there is a short stretch on the main road out of Burford, so take an OS map.

The church, St James the Great, is Grade II* and mostly twelfth-century at its core, with a Romanesque round chancel arch and a round stone font of the same period. Its churchyard holds a yew reckoned to be more than a thousand years old and over nineteen feet round, which puts the twelfth-century stonework in its place. Fulbrook has no conventional village hall; the rear of the church was converted into the Fulbrook Meeting Place, with an events space, a kitchen and a WC, and that is what the newsletters call the hall.

Muddy-Water History and Wider Outings

The name is older than any of it. Domesday records the place as Fulebroc, "foul brook", after a tributary that muddies as it runs down the valley to the Windrush. A local village plan once headed a section "Fulbrook – a lot of history for some muddy water". The Domesday surveyors valued the parish at sixteen pounds in both 1066 and 1086, with forty-one households and a single mill worth ten shillings. Ladyham, the timber-framed house dated 1583 above its door, was for a time the home of the novelist and composer Sir Compton Mackenzie.

Getting here is by road more than rail. The A361 passes through the village and meets the A424 at Fulbrook roundabout. The nearest station is Shipton, a few miles off but with a very sparse service; Charlbury or Kingham are the sensible options for trains. Buses through the village are thin, so check the current timetable before relying on one. Two miles south of Burford's junction with the A40, the Cotswold Wildlife Park lays out its walking-safari enclosures and the Skymaze playground, and a little further the riverside ruins of Minster Lovell Hall stand where a fifteenth-century manor once did.

The Chapel Stone That Survived

When the Wesleyan chapel was pulled down in 1957 to widen the road, someone reportedly reset the stone that carried its date and a line from Matthew into a dry-stone wall near where the chapel had stood.