Inside the small Norman church of St George, the walls are covered in purple outlines and russet stencils of flowers and foliage, painted directly onto the stone. Four seated figures, probably the Evangelists, look down from the vault over the sanctuary. It is a lot of decoration for a building this size, and the villagers of the 1870s agreed: when the Rev. W. Wiggin and the firm of Clayton and Bell finished their medieval-style scheme in about 1871, the parish disliked it enough to start a fund to have it removed. They never raised the money, so most of it survives.
Hampnett is a small, gated settlement of Cotswold stone on high ground west of the Fosse Way. Cottages and converted farm buildings sit loosely around the old common, and from the higher ground you can see Northleach church in the distance. Springs rise in the fields below and become the headwaters of the River Leach. The lane in from the A429 is minor.
The day in Hampnett tends to organise itself around the walk to Northleach and back. The signed route runs three and a half miles from Northleach Market Place, fairly easy going on footpaths and bridleways, though the paths can disappear under crops and turn muddy after rain. It crosses the Fosse Way, climbs to Manor Farm and St George's, passes the cottages around the common, and returns through woodland and fields beside the stream to the Old Prison. A longer seven-mile circuit takes in Farmington's green and church on the way.
Northleach, just over a mile away, is where you eat and shop. The Sherborne Arms stands on the Market Place, run by Peter Creed and Tom Noest, with a large bar, open fires, a separate restaurant and a courtyard outside; the kitchen works from British pub classics with offal and game. The Wheatsheaf Inn is an ivy-covered seventeenth-century coaching inn with fourteen bedrooms. Head Chef Horatio's menu changes with the season — twice-baked Nantwich cheddar soufflé with spinach and grain-mustard sauce, pan-seared chalk-stream trout with Isle of Wight tomatoes and broad beans, cyder-battered haddock with triple-cooked chips, Welsh rarebit made with Young's Original ale and Gloucester cheddar. It is dog-friendly, with a garden and cask ales.
For provisions, W J Castle is a butcher and delicatessen selling homemade sausages, Buccleuch beef and Old Spot pork. Fruit Cakes, a bakery and café on the Market Place, does cakes, pastries, sandwiches, rolls and cheese-and-onion pasties, and it holds the keys to the two all-weather tennis courts at the King George V playing field if you fancy a game while you are there.
The church keeps its older bones under the Victorian paint. The chancel and nave are Norman, from about 1125, with chevron and star mouldings on the choir arch and pairs of doves carved onto its capitals; the south wall, porch and west tower were added in the fifteenth century. There is a Perpendicular octagonal font, a pulpit built from reused seventeenth-century oak, and a broken medieval cross in the churchyard, probably still in its original position, dating from the fifteenth century.
The village was never large. In the Domesday survey it appears as Hantone, Old English for high farmstead, valued at six pounds a year in 1086, down from eight in 1066, with thirty-three recorded households — among them a priest, ten burgesses and eleven enslaved people. Roger of Ivry held it; before the Conquest it had belonged to the Archbishop of York. A Roman bronze figure of Hercules turned up somewhere in the parish and is said to be in the museum at Cheltenham.
The nearest railway station is Kingham, about ten miles off. The X52 bus stops on Northleach Market Place on its way between Cheltenham, Burford and Oxford, and Gloucestershire's Robin service can be booked to come out to the village when nothing scheduled can. Chedworth Roman Villa, with its mosaics, hypocausts and bath-house rooms, is a few miles away.
Writing about Hampnett, David Ross said it "seems like a place forgotten by the passage of time." The stencils the parish tried to paint over are still on the walls, and so, quietly, is the fund's failure.
