Icomb sits on a limestone ridge, its walls and gables gathered around St Mary's church and the manor house behind it, looking out over an open farming vale. There is no through road of any consequence; you reach it off the B4450 between Stow-on-the-Wold and Bledington, and the lane more or less ends at the village. This is the sort of place you arrive at on purpose.
Don't arrive expecting a pub, a shop or a café of Icomb's own; the practical business of eating and buying milk happens in the surrounding villages. Nearby Bledington is the natural pairing. Its community-owned shop and café is run by volunteers and stocks local bread, milk, fruit and vegetables, meats and pies, along with the seasonal cakes the volunteers bake themselves. The King's Head Inn faces the green there, a sixteenth-century stone inn with beams and an inglenook, where a recent visit turned up pork-belly bites, half a rotisserie chicken and venison pie. Dogs are welcome, though it is worth checking when you book.
The other direction takes you to Lower Oddington and The Fox, a seventeenth-century pub with a walled garden and a kitchen that leans on Daylesford produce down the road. The menu runs from a Fox double cheeseburger to chargrilled harissa chicken with romesco and smoked almonds, orzo primavera and a Diavolo pizza with 'nduja and hot honey. It has been a pub since at least 1856, when it also kept a shop, a carriage house and a skittle alley.
Walking is a major reason to come here. Christopher Somerville's seven-and-a-quarter-mile circuit begins on Bledington green and works through Nether and Church Westcote along the Oxfordshire Way and the Diamond Way, past young oak and silver birch, before climbing to Icomb church and dropping back across the fields. "The mellow walls and gables of ancient Icomb Place stood ahead on the ridge," he wrote of the approach, which is the view the village keeps for itself.
St Mary's is Grade I and mostly thirteenth-century, with a west tower added around 1600 and a blocked Norman doorway in the north wall that points to something older still. Inside is the reason to push the door: Sir John Blaket's effigy of 1431, lying beneath a carved chest-tomb canopy in the south transept, near a monument to William and Elizabeth Cope and a run of individual carved corbel heads. Blaket served in Henry V's campaign of 1415, and probably rebuilt the manor house up the ridge. Icomb Place still carries the original five-bay open roof over its great hall, and an attic room hides a faded red-brown wall painting of a sailing ship.
The village kept unusual company with Worcestershire for most of its history. Offa of Mercia is said to have given Icomb to the church at Worcester in the eighth century, and the parish stayed attached to that county, a detached island of Worcestershire inside Gloucestershire, until an Act of 1844 finally moved it. The Domesday surveyors, working in 1086, called it Iacumbe; the Icomb Place holding was valued at two pounds, the same as twenty years before. On the hill above, a low earth bank known as Icomb Camp has been called Danish, Neolithic and Iron Age in turn; recent digging favours something much later, perhaps a Civil War marching camp.
Getting here without a car takes patience. Kingham station, on the line through the Cotswolds, is about 2.8 miles away, but the only bus into the village itself is the volunteer-run Villager V9, which calls on Fridays alone, out in the early afternoon and back an hour before five. For many visitors a car will be more convenient, and Stow-on-the-Wold, with its stone market square and shops, is a short drive for anything the smaller villages lack. For children on a wet day, Birdland at Bourton-on-the-Water keeps penguins, more than five hundred birds and a dinosaur trail across its riverside gardens.
Back in the church, Blaket's dog still lies at his master's feet, carved alongside him in 1431. At some point the head broke off, and the dog is missing it still.
