Ten dwellings, two of them farmhouses, make up Hidcote Boyce, and the National Trust owns every one. They stand in a cluster of stone and thatch reached by narrow lanes or field paths, on the high northern edge of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, close to the Warwickshire border. Curved medieval ridge-and-furrow still marks the fields around the hamlet. There is no pub, shop or church in the hamlet itself.
Hidcote House is a Grade I manor whose gable carries the inscription F.K.1663, for Francis Keyte. Its twentieth-century Arts and Crafts additions include lead rainwater heads shaped with animals and flowers and plasterwork possibly by Norman Jewson, laid over seventeenth-century fireplaces, panelling, a studded door and its locking bar. It is a private house rather than somewhere to visit.
What brings people here is the walking and two gardens. From Mickleton, a four-mile circuit climbs about 450 feet in roughly two hours, opening views over the Vale of Evesham and Meon Hill before passing Kiftsgate, Hidcote Bartrim and Hidcote Boyce, crossing a stream and returning along the escarpment on the Heart of England Way. It belongs to the Miles Without Stiles series, though the mapped route still includes gates, a low stone stile, steps and a stony track. The Hidcote visitor reception has four route cards for shorter walks, from twenty minutes to two and a half hours.
Hidcote Manor Garden lies at the end of that circuit, in neighbouring Hidcote Bartrim. Major Lawrence Johnston laid out its ten and a half acres of linked outdoor rooms between 1907 and 1938 and gave it to the National Trust in 1948, the first garden the Trust took on for the garden alone. There is a café, a shop, a plant centre and benches; a step-free route covers about a third of the ground, with steps or uneven going over the rest, and dogs on short leads are allowed everywhere except the Old Garden and the Manor House.
Kiftsgate Court Gardens sit on the scarp beside the Hidcote Boyce–Lower Quinton road, looking out over the same vale. Heather Muir began planting here around 1920 with help from Johnston next door, and later generations carried it on — "the creation of three generations of women gardeners," as the garden describes itself. The White Garden and Rose Border are the set pieces, along with the Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate', planted in 1938 and long claimed as the largest rose in England. Children are welcome, but the banks are steep and the water deep, and dogs are not admitted.
For a meal you head to the surrounding villages. The Kings Arms at Mickleton has low beams, log fires, a snug and a garden, and takes well-behaved dogs on leads. The Ebrington Arms is more food-led: beer-battered fish and chips with crushed peas and tartare, pork belly with apricot compote and crackling, roasted-red-pepper fregola with feta and a black-olive crumb, and a strawberry-and-elderflower meringue. In Ebrington too is Vegetable Matters, a farm shop and café going since 2017, with much of its produce grown at Drinkwater Farm nearby.
Ebrington also has the nearest parish church, St Eadburga's, which is Grade I. The Norman south doorway is moulded with chevron, and the early studded oak door is barred by a length of iron about two metres long. Inside are a 1679 pulpit, the recumbent effigy of Sir John Fortescue in his legal robes, and monuments to the Keyt family. A plaque records William Keyte's Cow Charity of 1632, which gave poor families milk from ten cows and became a money trust in 1952. The tower clock, made by a village blacksmith around 1748, has no face and is still wound by hand.
Hidcote Boyce is old enough to appear in Domesday, under Gloucestershire. The single recorded household was one enslaved person, and there was one lord's plough team; the manor was valued at two pounds a year in both 1066 and 1086, when Winchcombe Abbey held it. The "Boyce" may preserve the name of a de Bois tenant.
Getting here takes some care. The nearest station is Honeybourne, about four and a half miles off, with no taxi rank, so pre-book a taxi. By road the turning is a mile east of the B4632; satnav tends to send drivers down a farm track, so the surer approach is through Mickleton by the brown signs. Buses from Lower Farm are minimal — a community service to Mickleton and Stratford on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and to Moreton-in-Marsh on Fridays — and worth checking before you count on them.
The field path between the two Hidcotes was already on the 1884 Ordnance Survey map, and it remains the route between the two hamlets.
