Little Barrington

Limestone, Water and the Southern Inn

The stone here is honey-coloured limestone, and the cottages built from it sit close to the River Windrush, which runs clear along the valley floor. This is a village: a scatter of houses, a Grade I church, a manor behind trees, and a causeway across the river that Strong paid for. You can walk the whole of it quickly, and spend rather longer looking at the water.

For dinner you have two good options, both a short way out. The Inn for All Seasons sits just off the A40 on the southern edge, a family-run inn where Christophe Arcalis cooks from fresh seasonal produce and has fish sent up from Devon and Cornwall. The menu runs to pan-fried duck breast with dauphinoise and a blackberry jus, braised pig cheeks with horseradish mash, chicken supreme with sage-and-onion forcemeat, hake under a Provençale crust, a French-style fish soup, steak-and-ale pie, and a veganloaf for anyone who wants it. Dogs are welcome, dog-friendly tables can be booked ahead, and the Mews rooms open straight onto the garden.

Across the Windrush and On to Burford

Across the Windrush, reached by Strong's Causeway, the Fox belongs officially to Great Barrington but markets itself as a base for walks between the two villages. The King family took it on at the start of 2022; Mike Burkert runs the kitchen with a seasonal menu of pub cooking and a few more adventurous things, and there is a garden by the water for warm evenings. Seven rooms upstairs mean you can stay the night, and it is said to be dog-friendly too.

There is no shop here now, no butcher or bakery. For those you drive the three miles to Burford, down the Windrush Valley, where the High Street tips steeply toward its own bridge and the independent shops the hamlet does without.

Valley Walks and St Peter's

The walking is the reason to be here. A six-mile circular links Windrush, both Barringtons and Sherborne along the river and across farmland walled in dry stone, honey-coloured villages at the turns, roughly three hours with a few steep pitches. A five-mile route follows the valley into Burford, passing St Peter's, the Fox, the old mill and a run of footbridges. If you want less, there is a two-mile loop on quiet paths with valley views. Trains are not really the way in: Shipton, the nearest station, runs a very thin service, and Charlbury or Kingham are the practical railheads. The A40 is the main road in. The village is also on the North Cotswolds Robin, a bookable minibus with stops at Minnow Lane, the phone box, the Fox and the Inn.

St Peter's is worth finding. The late-12th-century doorway carries chevron, lozenge and dogtooth carving and a small monstrous head; an older tympanum, now moved, shows Christ in Majesty between winged angels. Inside are early wagon roofs, a squint, a 15th-century octagonal limestone font, traces of 14th-century glass, and substantial monuments to the Greenway, Grayhurst and Tayler families.

Quarrymen, Mill and Manor

The stone is the whole story. The Strongs quarried it, sent it down the Windrush and Thames to help repair Westminster Abbey, and gave the trade its landmark date: Thomas Strong laid the foundation stone of St Paul's Cathedral on 21 June 1675. It was the same family's money that built the causeway you crossed to reach the Fox. Down at the river a Grade II mill and cottage range worked as a paper mill from 1816 to 1846; the machinery is gone and part of it is now homes.

Behind its trees, Barrington Grove is an early-17th-century manor of local stone, with gables and mullioned windows; Giles Greenaway bought the estate in 1779, and it has stayed with his descendants since. None of this troubled the Domesday surveyors, who found one household, six acres of meadow and a mill valued at three shillings and a penny, and put the whole place at two pounds. It had been worth two pounds twenty years earlier.

When the River Takes Over

In the evening the green empties, the light goes off the water, and the loudest thing is the Windrush itself.