Hawkesbury Upton

Inside the Beaufort Arms

Inside the Beaufort Arms, among the pub and brewery memorabilia crowding its two low-beamed bars, sit a pair of period dentist chairs. It is a traditional country free house, the only pub the parish now lists, and it stands just off the Cotswold Way, reached by a short footpath across the cricket field. Mark and Fiona Steeds have run it since 1994, and in 2019 it collected a CAMRA plaque for twenty-five years in the Good Beer Guide.

The Sunday menu runs to roast beef, pork or chicken with the trimmings, a vegetarian nut roast, breaded whole-tail scampi, Gloucestershire ham, egg and chips, beef and vegetarian lasagnes, an aromatic Penang coconut curry, West Country faggots and battered halloumi. PROP volunteers keep a market garden that sends seasonal produce to the kitchen. Dogs are welcome in the Public Bar but not the carpeted Lounge or Dining Room, so mention yours when you book.

Mark Steeds trained as a draughtsman before he took the pub on. "I went from drawing pictures to drawing pints," he said.

Provisions and arrival

For provisions, Hawkesbury Stores on the High Street is community-owned and used to serving both residents and Cotswold Way walkers, who come in for food, drink and directions. There is a separate Post Office branch on Back Street for mail, everyday banking, bills and travel money.

The nearest station is Yate, about 5.7 miles off and run by Great Western Railway. The Y8 bus links the village to Yate, Chipping Sodbury and Wotton-under-Edge, though services here change, so it is worth checking live times; the final approach by car is on minor roads off the A46.

Village events and Cotswold Edge walks

Behind the village are a children's play park, a skate park, a football pitch, and cricket and tennis clubs. The village hall and recreation ground host the Hawkesbury Horticultural Show each year, its produce marquee filling with fruit, vegetables, flowers, crafts, home baking, wine, photographs and pictures; the day has also run to a carnival procession, fairground rides, live music, archery, a beer tent and a deer roast, and it draws around two thousand people. The literature festival, founded by the author Debbie Young and launched on World Book Night in 2015, now spreads smaller events across the year and lends a hand to the show, the scarecrow festival and the Christmas-tree festival.

The village sits on the Cotswold Edge, and the walking is much of the reason to come. A four-mile circuit via Kilcott drops through wooded coombes beside a brook that is sometimes dry, passes the mill and cottages at Kilcott, then climbs a steep sunken stretch of the Cotswold Way and returns along the ridge past the Somerset Monument. The tricky slopes and stiles ask for reasonable fitness, and you may spot buzzards overhead and views across to Wotton-under-Edge and Newark Park. A longer six-mile history walk from the village hall takes in the Drover's Pool, the medieval strip-field lynchets at The Sands, St Mary's and Horton Court.

Monument, church and manor

The Somerset Monument is hard to miss on either route: a tapering ashlar tower of about a hundred feet, built in 1846 by Lewis Vulliamy, carrying the Beaufort portcullis and finished with an unusual Chinese-effect top. It commemorates General Lord Robert Edward Henry Somerset, who led the Household Cavalry Brigade at Waterloo and died in 1842, and it stands on the site of a bowling green recorded in 1669.

St Mary the Virgin is not in Hawkesbury Upton itself but down in the smaller hamlet of Hawkesbury, a steep walk or short drive away. Graded I, it is a twelfth-century church on the site of a Saxon church, with later medieval additions and a fifteenth-century Perpendicular west tower with gargoyles, embattled parapets and a sundial. Inside are seventeenth-century box pews, a Romanesque north doorway carved with dog-tooth moulding, a fragment of medieval glass showing St Giles, and monuments to the Jenkinsons, one of whom became the second Earl of Liverpool and prime minister from 1812 to 1821. The manor house that stood beside the church was abandoned soon after 1770.

Domesday and the rescued village sign

The Domesday surveyors counted fifty-two households here, along with ten acres of meadow and three mills, and valued the whole estate, then held by Pershore Abbey, at ten pounds — down from sixteen twenty years before.

An old black-and-yellow AA village sign now hangs at the Beaufort. Anne Sheppard found it around 1981 doing service as the cover of a well at the Blue Boy, a pub that is no longer a pub, and passed it to the one that still is.