On Lower Green, the Howard Arms has stood for four hundred years, a Cotswold-stone inn built when Shakespeare was still working eight miles up the road in Stratford. It is pub, restaurant and eight-room B&B at once. Head chef Adam Pieprzak's kitchen runs to pork-and-black-pudding crispy rillettes with celeriac remoulade, parmesan gnocchi with sun-dried tomato and hazelnut, beer-battered haddock with chunky chips, and sticky toffee pudding with clotted cream and honeycomb. Two things on the drinks list are made in the village itself: Ilmington's own Cotswold Apple Brandy and a honey liqueur called Spirit of Ilmington. Dogs are welcome in the bar.
A short walk off is the Red Lion, a Hook Norton house with a fire-warmed bar and a secluded garden enclosed at the back. It welcomes dogs by the open fire and pours Hook Norton beers and ciders, and its cooking leans modern British and local. It has carried the same name for a while: a photograph in the county record office shows the Red Lion Inn in 1900.
The village shop closed in 2012, and for three years there wasn't one. The Ilmington Community Shop and Café now occupies the former St Philip's Roman Catholic church on Upper Green — a building that started as a Catholic school in 1867, became a church in 1935, and closed in 2013 before the volunteers took it on. It is a cooperative, run by manager Michele Hall with Laura Groves and a rota of volunteers who bake the croissants. You will find local fruit and vegetables, bread, cakes, meat, pies, deli goods and local beers, ciders and spirits. A Grimsby fishmonger, Leigh McCall, usually calls on Mondays.
Ilmington is Warwickshire's highest village, climbing a deep combe below Ilmington Downs in honey-coloured ironstone. It has two greens, Lower and Upper, remnant orchards of many apple varieties scattered through it, and footpaths crossing in every direction.
Those footpaths are much of the reason to come. The circuit from the Howard Arms out to Hidcote and back is 7.4 miles, climbing to the county's highest point with long Cotswold views; the National Trust garden at Hidcote — ten and a half acres of Arts-and-Crafts outdoor rooms that Lawrence Johnston laid out between 1907 and 1938 — sits about two miles off as the map measures it. A longer eight-mile circular links the village with Ebrington, passing Foxcote House and returning over high ground said to take in at least four counties. For anyone with a wheelchair, mobility scooter or buggy, there is an easy three-quarter-mile loop on hard surfaces.
St Mary the Virgin has a mid-12th-century core, Norman zig-zag moulding and a castellated 15th-century tower stage with gargoyles. Inside are a painted sundial, an 1868 clock, a priest's effigy and a Tudor chest, and, if you look for them, eleven carved mice left by Robert Thompson, the Yorkshire furniture-maker whose workshop signed its work with a mouse. An embroidered Apple Map records where the old village orchards stood. Dorothy Hodgkin is buried in the churchyard.
Hodgkin worked out the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12 by X-ray crystallography, won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — the first British woman to do so — and died at Ilmington in 1994. The village has an older inheritance too, one harder to catch on a quiet afternoon: a Morris tradition the parish council traces back more than three hundred years. "The dances of the village have remained within certain families for generations," the council records, and the side still performs, at home and abroad. Cecil Sharp came to collect the dances in the early 1900s.
The Domesday commissioners found the place split between three landholders in 1086, fifty-two households in all, and valued the three holdings together at twelve pounds and fifteen shillings.
For families there is Grace's Playground, with swings, a basket swing and an adventure trail, set beside a field with football and cricket pitches, and a floodlit multi-sports surface you can book for tennis. The nearest station is Moreton-in-Marsh, a little over eight miles away; Stratford-upon-Avon is eight miles north and Shipston-on-Stour three and a half to the south-east, with the Service 10 bus linking the village to both.
On a Monday the fishmonger's van pulls up outside a shop that used to be a church, and the croissants go out on the counter behind it.
