Limpley Stoke

The Hop Pole Returns

On Woods Hill, the Hop Pole Inn is open again. The pub closed in 2018 and might have stayed that way, but Limpley Stoke Community Benefit Society bought it in 2022: four hundred people raised half a million pounds in five weeks, and after refurbishment it reopened in January 2025 under a community benefit society with eight hundred shareholders and two hundred volunteers behind it. The building dates from the 1550s and was once called the Monks Wine House. It also stood in for a country inn in the 1993 film The Remains of the Day, which is the sort of thing you notice on the way to the bar rather than the reason to go.

Recent dinners have included smoked ham-hock scrumpet with smoked-chilli aioli, Fruit Pig black pudding with cider-mustard sauce and remoulade, whole grilled plaice with warm tartare sauce, wild-garlic gnocchi with beef ragù and salsa verde, and a chicken, bacon and Iford Cider pie. There are usually two or three changing guest ales from small independent breweries in Somerset, Wiltshire and beyond. Dogs are welcome throughout on leads, with water bowls and brewers' grain treats supplied, and the beer garden opened in the summer after reopening. Beyond food-service hours the pub keeps a free community room, and the calendar runs to supper clubs, skiffle, comedy, quizzes and live music.

Community Provisions and Canal Country

For provisions, the nearby community shop is the Galleries on Freshford Lane, which sits just over the parish line in Freshford but is owned and run jointly for both villages, its profits reinvested locally. It bakes bread and croissants in store and stocks small-batch ready meals, locally butchered meat, fruit and vegetables, wholefoods, deli goods, wine and beer. Named suppliers include Hartley Farm meat, Lievito Bakery sourdough, Bertinet Bakery bread and Cavendish Cooks meals. The manager, Amy Green, introduces herself on the shop's own website: "Community and connection are values that resonate profoundly with me." There is a shared car park, playing field and children's playground alongside, and the café is wheelchair accessible, with toilets, a water refill point, bike racks and a defibrillator.

The village itself climbs the steep western side of the Avon valley, the railway running parallel to the river below and woods rising to the west and north-west. This is walking country. From Dundas Marina a gently climbing, accessible route runs four hundred metres to Dundas Aqueduct, where the Kennet and Avon Canal crosses both the river and the main railway line on three Bath-stone arches; you can return the same way or press on beside the largely disused Somersetshire Coal Canal. The longer Colliers Way follows old railway alignments and quiet lanes from the aqueduct towards Radstock and Frome, more than half of it traffic-free, past a linear orchard and a stack of seven boulders set up for the geologist William Smith. Paths through Friary Wood make a quiet approach to the Grade I gardens at Iford Manor, though the lanes into it are steep and narrow.

Saxon Stone and Working History

The Church of St Mary stands above the older part of the village. It keeps a fine Saxon arch, a thirteenth-century north porch, a fifteenth-century stone pulpit with cusped panels, a recessed octagonal spire and a font on an eighteenth-century pedestal. It was first dedicated not to Mary but to St Edith of Wilton.

Around it lie the traces of a much-worked landscape. The first settlement here was called Hanging Stoke in 1322 and was all but emptied by the Black Death; a new weaving community grew up to the north, and the name Limpley Stoke first appears in 1585. A fulling mill worked from 1614 and employed more than two hundred people by 1816; in 1875 it became the birthplace of what grew into the Avon Rubber Company before that firm left for Melksham. The hotel higher up the hill was once a hydropathic resort, complete with Turkish baths.

Getting Here

Freshford, across the Avon, has the nearest working station, on the Great Western line, though the platforms are not step-free; the A36 threads through the parish, and Libra Travel's route 94 stops by the Hop Pole on its way between Trowbridge and Bath.

A Memorial Place to Play

King George V Play Park was laid out on Woods Hill in 1936 as a memorial recreation field. It has swings, a boules pitch and a barbecue, and on a warm afternoon the sound of it carries down the hill to the canal.