The green is broad and open, and the Old Post Office café sits at the edge of it. Postal business still happens here a couple of mornings a week, from a counter that also puts out Malaysian fried eggs with a spiced tomato-and-soy sambal, Turkish shakshuka with aubergine, chickpeas and pomegranate molasses, and mee goreng served with fried Spam. There is a Postman's breakfast too, sausage rolls with a house sweet-chilli sauce, sourdough toasties, and a daily gluten-free cake. Dogs are welcome inside and out, with their own menu and a few treats on the house.
Round on Church Lane, The Cotswold Guy grew out of a private-chef business and now works as a farm shop and takeaway with garden seating. The collection-only counter deals in signature and mini beef Wellingtons, a côte-de-boeuf kit, Scotch eggs and smoked baby-back ribs.
The Farmers Arms is a Donnington Brewery pub, run by Luke and Kelsie, with exposed beams, a log burner, a skittle alley and a long sweeping bar. The kitchen sends out baked Camembert with focaccia and red-onion chutney, a Farmer's Ploughman's of ham, mature cheddar and pork pie, slow-roasted pork-belly bites in hot honey and chilli, beer-battered haddock and chips, a homemade pie of the day, and a spiced cauliflower-and-lentil pie for anyone eating vegan. The three regular Donnington casks are BB, SBA and Cotswold Gold, and there is a large beer garden with parking.
The Hollow Bottom, a freehouse and six-bedroom inn, keeps a horse-racing identity that the food does not quite prepare you for. The kitchen leans on local meat, game and seasonal produce, and the week has its fixtures: a Nap of the Day, Monday pies, a grill night with peppercorn sauce, and Thursday burgers. Dogs are welcome in every part of the pub, and the bedrooms take them too. The garden fills in summer.
The racing runs deep here. The pub was Ye Olde Inn until the trainer Nigel Twiston-Davies and Raymond Mould bought it in the summer of 1996. Bindaree, their 2002 Grand National winner, now lends its name to the house IPA, brewed by North Cotswold Brewery, and pours alongside Shagweaver, Windrush and Hooky Best Bitter. A lager called Splash of Ginge remembers the 2017 Paddy Power Gold Cup winner, with fifty pence from every pint going to Stamp Out Suicide.
Both official walks start from the green. The Guiting Power and Castlett route runs four and a half miles along drovers' trails and quiet lanes, following the Guiting Stream for a stretch; it carries the Miles Without Stiles label but still climbs a fair way. The longer Naunton circular is six and a quarter miles on sections of the Windrush Way and the Wardens' Way, taking in a lake, woodland and the edge of Naunton Downs golf course. Paths drop quickly from the green into folds of high farmland and climb again through fields and drystone walls, the pale stone reflecting the Jurassic limestone that underlies this part of the Cotswolds.
The church of St Michael and All Angels holds two twelfth-century doorways. The north one has a chevroned arch with billet and star ornament, and one of its jamb capitals is carved as a head with its tongue hanging out. The nave roof, partly fifteenth-century, has carved-face corbels and bosses of a bearded man and a Tudor rose.
Much of what you see standing owes something to Raymond Cochrane, who in 1968 bought the manor lands and more than half the village's houses when rural decline had left many of them roofless, restored them, and set up the Guiting Manor Amenity Trust to carry the work on. The name is older: "Power" comes from the le Poer family, lords here in the early 1200s, and the village was Lower Guiting until "Guiting Power" was settled on in the 1940s.
Moreton-in-Marsh, about twelve miles by road, is the nearest station; otherwise the approach is on narrow high-wold lanes. The parish council says there is no regular bus, and points residents to the county's bookable Robin service instead. Cotswold Farm Park, just over a mile away, keeps more than fifty rare and native breeds, Golden Guernsey goats and Highland cattle among them, and Sudeley Castle at Winchcombe is five miles on, with ten gardens and Katherine Parr buried in the chapel.
Behind the village hall is the playing field, and every July since 1970 it has hosted the Guiting Music Festival across the last ten days of the month, with evening concerts and two Sunday performances out in the open air, children and well-behaved dogs on leads welcome for those.
