Kemerton

Inn fires and High Street coffee

The stone fireplace in the Crown Inn is listed, set into a bar with slab flooring and low beams that mark the building out as an 18th-century coaching inn. An interconnecting door once led through to the rooms where travellers slept, beside a business that hired out waggonettes and hunters. Today it is four rooms, a log fire and a sunny courtyard, with real ales and locally brewed cider.

The kitchen has run to Gloucester Old Spot sausages with grain-mustard mash, a chicken-and-bacon pie, battered cod and a burger topped with pulled pork and Monterey Jack, and more recently to Thai food from Phanthong Thai and food pop-ups. It is worth checking what the kitchen is doing the week you arrive rather than assuming any of it.

On the High Street, Kemerton Coffee House is independent and takes dogs. It does coffee and homemade food from local produce where it can, and one testimonial praises its cappuccinos and toasties.

From southern slopes to the summit

The village runs along the southern slopes of Bredon Hill, at Worcestershire's extreme southern edge. The parish is long and narrow, dropping from the 300-metre hilltop to the Carrant Brook at around twenty metres, so nearly any walk out of the village comes down to how much of that height you want to take on. The immediate setting is fields, orchards and old paths, and the northern half of the parish sits within the Cotswolds National Landscape.

From the pub it is only about a fifth of a mile to the hill's lower slopes. The route from the church is a little over six miles and takes about three hours, climbing to the Iron Age earthworks of Kemerton Camp at the top. On the south rampart stands Parsons Folly, a two-storey stone tower put up in the mid-18th century by John Parsons, the local MP, and said in the village to have been built to lift the hill to a thousand feet. From the summit the view reaches across to the Malvern Hills.

Wetland and high-church detail

Lower down, Kemerton Lake is a former gravel working now given over to reed beds, pools, scrub and grassland, with enough wildlife interest to justify an unhurried hour. It is said to link on foot to the John Moore Nature Reserve, though the paths are better followed with an OS map than trusted to signposts.

The Church of St Nicholas has stood here since the early 13th century, and its first known rector, Richard Muchegros, was recorded in 1242. Most of what you see, though, is Victorian: R. C. Carpenter rebuilt everything except the west tower between 1846 and 1850 for Thomas Thorp, Archdeacon of Bristol. Thorp was a supporter of the Oxford Movement, and the high-church rebuilding was controversial at the time. Inside there is a painted barrel roof over the chancel, Willement and Hardman glass, an ornate octagonal stone font, a timber pulpit and a large parish chest.

Houses, records and two writers

Kemerton Court, behind a baroque front of giant pilasters, ball and urn finials and a central pediment, began as a 17th-century house and was refronted around 1720. Its main door now faces the back, having been turned around after the road was moved in the early 19th century. Open Domesday estimates roughly forty households here, among the largest fifth of settlements recorded, though multiple places share the entry.

Two writers are tied to the place. Charlotte Wilson, born in the village in 1854, went on to edit the anarchist paper Freedom and paid for much of its early running; of her schooling at Newnham she said, "Cambridge was the porch through which I entered the world." The novelist John Moore lived here later in life and renamed Bredon Hill "Brensham Hill" in his books.

Getting here, looking up

Ashchurch for Tewkesbury, managed by Great Western Railway, is about four miles off; Kemerton lies near M5 junction nine and some five miles north-east of Tewkesbury. The 540 bus runs roughly hourly between Evesham and Tewkesbury by way of Beckford, Kemerton and Bredon, though onward connections into the village take some planning; check the current timetable before you rely on it.

The hill Moore was writing about is still there, above the village.