The Neeld Arms is a seventeenth-century inn in Grittleton, with a bar, dining rooms and six bedrooms above. The kitchen works in seasonal British cooking; recent menus have included Cotswold lamb rump with wild mushrooms, soft polenta and cider sauce; pork and black-pudding bonbons with apple ketchup; cider-and-dill battered fish and chips; a courgette and lemon risotto; and an orange-and-ginger treacle tart to finish. Dogs are welcome in every downstairs room as long as they behave, though not in the bedrooms. There is a front terrace and a courtyard rather than a beer garden. It was the Red Lion until 1944, when it took the Neeld name, and Princess Margaret is among the visitors the pub remembers.
Grittleton sits minutes from Junction 17 of the M4, which crosses the wider parish, and about three miles from Castle Combe. The nearest station is Chippenham, roughly six miles off, with parking, a taxi rank and step-free access. Faresaver buses 95 and 95A stop at Grittleton House Gates on their way between Chippenham and Castle Combe, though the timetable is thin and some journeys have request or set-down-only conditions, so check the day you travel.
There is no shop in the village now. The building still called The Old Stores keeps a wide ground-floor window that looks like the front of a shop that once traded there.
The village is a small L-shaped run of houses along The Street and Alderton Road, built almost entirely in Cotswold stone. Its coherence comes from the Neeld estate: house, cottages and outbuildings were designed to match, so the place reads as one composition.
St Mary the Virgin stands close to the pub, Grade II* and largely medieval in origin. Its beginnings reach back to about 1200, with a fifteenth-century west tower of three embattled stages, finished in pinnacles and gargoyles. John Pinch the younger added the south aisle in 1836; A. W. Blomfield restored the church heavily between 1865 and 1867. Inside are an original north arcade on circular piers with carved capitals, a stone pulpit brought from the church at Leigh Delamere, a slender Gothic font of 1836, and twelve continental carved-wood oval panels taken from the Neeld family pew. There is a festival choir and a bell-ringing team.
A four-mile loop starts at the Neeld Arms, mostly flat and firm enough for wet weather. It passes the church and the estate cottages, gives views of the house, and returns beneath the M4 without ever reaching Castle Combe. It is worth checking the county's rights-of-way notices before you set out, since paths do close.
Grittleton House looms over all of it. Joseph Neeld bought the 1,248-acre estate in 1828, funded by the £660,230 he inherited from his great-uncle, the goldsmith Philip Rundell. James Thomson built and enlarged the house for him between about 1832 and 1856; Henry Clutton adjusted the design in 1853–54 before being dismissed. It is a huge, stylistically mixed building, Grade II*, with a three-storey central hall, a processional staircase, marble fireplaces and a library retaining mahogany bookcases. Neeld's own marriage to Lady Caroline Ashley-Cooper ended in separation, and by some accounts it lasted four days.
The estate cottages on Alderton Road were built in pairs, each with a large garden for growing food and a pigsty of its own. The village twice declined to install street lighting, in 1901 and again in 1938. Long before any of this, Domesday recorded twenty-three households here and valued the manor, held by Glastonbury Abbey, at £21 a year.
Castle Combe's honey-coloured cottages sit in a wooded valley three miles away, where parking is limited and visitors are asked to use the car park rather than drive in. Sevington Victorian School, within the parish, keeps Miss Squire's schoolroom complete with desk, pointer and blackboard, open on selected days and by arrangement. Lacock Abbey and its Fox Talbot Museum of photography are a short drive off, as is Westonbirt arboretum near Tetbury.
The house is now a private wedding and events venue, run by Matthew Shipp, whose family first came in 1967 to buy furniture and left having bought the whole place. He keeps it with his wife Vanessa and a dog named Juno.
