Great Rissington

The Village’s Pub and Club

The Lamb Inn stands in Great Rissington, a Brakspear pub with rooms, a patio garden and an EV charger in the car park. Elliot is head chef, with more than thirteen years in Michelin-starred kitchens, and now cooks shepherd's pie made with Cotswold lamb. He and Kathleen run the place. The menu moves with the season: beer-battered haddock and chips, beef shin and Brakspear ale pie, lamb rump with mash, wild garlic and chimichurri, a miso-roasted aubergine for anyone leaving the meat alone, and Edie's tarte Tatin, made with apples from Edie's own trees. Dogs are welcome.

It is the village's pub. The Great Rissington Club is a social venue rather than a second pub — drinks, and film, quiz and food nights — and home to the village cricket and archery clubs.

Food Stops and Wider Connections

The Bledington Shop & Café is a useful food stop beyond the village, carrying fruit and vegetables, bread and cakes, local meat and pies, deli goods, and local beer and cider. The 802 bus reaches Bourton-on-the-Water's war memorial eight minutes after leaving the Lamb Inn. From Bourton it is a short walk to Birdland, nine acres beside the Windrush with more than five hundred birds, a dinosaur trail, a double zip-line, and England's only breeding group of king penguins.

Kingham is the nearest railway station, about five miles off and run by Great Western Railway. The 802 links the village to Bourton and the two neighbouring Rissingtons from Monday to Saturday but not on Sundays — check the timetable before travelling without a car.

Windrush Walks and Medieval Details

The village sits high on the Cotswold hills above the Windrush valley. At its western end the ground falls away towards the river, roughly a kilometre off. A stile-free circular walk starts at the church, runs to about two and three-quarter miles, and takes a couple of hours. It crosses arable land that turns muddy after rain, follows the Windrush opposite the National Trust's restored wetlands and water meadows at Sherborne, and climbs back beside Mill Copse. Wear suitable footwear, especially after rain.

St John the Baptist has a tower whose base dates to about 1200, with upper stages rebuilt in the fifteenth century; much of the rest was rebuilt in 1873. Inside there is a fifteenth-century octagonal font, a fourteenth-century piscina, and a 1621 monument to John Barnarde with kneeling figures, an angel, a skull, an hourglass and Jacobean scrollwork. A reset porch panel, once painted, shows the Crucifixion above the Ascension.

The Lost Souls and Village History

The nave holds a white marble First World War memorial to thirteen men of the village. Five were brothers — the Souls boys — who died between 1916 and 1918. Three had served in the 16th Cheshires, a bantam regiment raised for men below the army's minimum height; the twins Alfred and Walter were both killed in 1918. Their mother, Annie, is said to have kept a candle burning for a missing son, and afterwards would not stand for the national anthem. The parish still calls them "the Lost Souls of Great Rissington."

The Domesday commissioners counted thirty-eight households here in 1086. Great Rissington Manor, private and not presented as a visitor attraction, grew from a seventeenth-century farm on a site recorded in 1309; the Marling family enlarged it in 1929, folding in the old farm buildings and a granary and laying out formal gardens from which the church tower is still visible across the lawns.

School and Village Sport

The Rissington School has taught children of these villages since 1897, and its Great Rissington site is still in use. The cricket club was founded in 1961 on a ground high enough to take in the whole Windrush valley, and the archers shoot beside it on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings, weather permitting.