The Hog is the family-run pub at the centre of Horsley. Luke Honeychurch took it over in April 2020 and renovated it through the first lockdown. What he reopened is a village local with quiz nights, darts, live music and a rotating cast of Saturday guest kitchens, which have run through curry, falafels, burgers and Mediterranean food from one week to the next. The menu also runs to pizza. The beer is locally sourced, with Arbor Ales and Stroud Brewery among the names that turn up on the pumps.
In the pavilion beside the play park is the Horsley Community Shop, volunteer-run and now into its second decade. The shelves lean local: organic vegetables from Broadfield Farm, Godsell's and Jonathan Crump cheeses, apple juice pressed nearby, Hobbs House bread, the Horsley Sausage, award-winning Plenty Pies, and cakes and bakes. A fishmonger calls once a week. There is free Wi-Fi, a Refill Stroud point for topping up bottles, and a rack of local art, stamps and the Sunday papers.
Horsley is not really a single village but a dispersed parish of sixteen hamlets spread across almost six square miles, home to around 750 people and lying wholly within the Cotswolds. The approaches are steep, winding lanes between Cotswold-stone houses and dry-stone walls, pasture giving way to woodland, with the church tower standing above the low line of the roofs. The settled valleys sit near Nailsworth; the higher hamlets ride the wolds above them.
The walking is the reason many people come. Near Nailsworth, National Trust land at Woodchester Park runs down a secluded wooded valley past a string of five lakes, a nineteenth-century boathouse and an unfinished Victorian Gothic mansion that was never completed. Waymarked trails thread the valley: a short circuit of 1.75 miles from Tinkley Gate down to the lakes, a longer 4.4-mile loop taking in parkland and waterside, and a 3.5-mile route that passes the mansion and boathouse. The ground is uneven and steep in places. There is a café, toilets and a natural play trail of stepping logs and balance beams at Tinkley Gate. Closer to home, the parish itself is laced with footpaths and bridleways over old stone stiles and through pasture and woodland gaps, with broad valley views and steep, narrow lanes to watch for where the paths meet roads.
The church of St Martin keeps a broad fifteenth-century west tower, the one survivor of the medieval building; Thomas Rickman rebuilt the body in 1838–39. Outside are crenellated parapets and crocketed pinnacles; inside, a ribbed pointed barrel vault over the chancel and monuments to local clothiers, among them Edward Webb, who died in 1751. The architectural historian David Verey described it as "a preaching church in rather thin Gothic clothes."
Older layers surface if you look for them. A house of correction stood here from 1792 to 1878, which often received first-time and minor offenders and young people rather than sending them to the county gaol; traces of its wall survive. Before that came a small Benedictine priory, a cell of the abbey of St Martin at Troarn in Normandy, whose monks lived here until the property was traded away in 1260. Its record is not an edifying one: a fourteenth-century inquiry accused one prior of selling off timber and eighty head of cattle, and another of dropping the daily dinner owed to six poor people.
Getting here means the B4058 and the Cotswold Green route 40 bus, which stops by The Hog and runs the few minutes to Nailsworth for a wider range of shops, and on to Stroud and its trains.
At the heart of the village is the Washpool, once used for dipping sheep. Children paddle in it now.
