The Coach & Horses sits on a bank above the green and the war memorial, an eighteenth-century inn of Cotswold stone with flagstones and an open fire in a single bar. Its regular real ales are from Donnington Brewery, about a mile off, where the spring water is drawn from beside the millpond and the original mill wheel still drives some of the brewing machinery. Donnington BB, SBA and Cotswold Gold are the regulars. Dogs are welcome, and there is a garden that looks out over the village.
The kitchen changes its menu often, so any single dish is a sample rather than a promise. Recent boards have run to French onion soup, baked figs with streaky bacon, blue cheese and honey, a ham-hock terrine, turkey buttermilk schnitzel with alpine potatoes, rib-eye, fish pie, and a roast-vegetable and pearl-barley stew, finishing on sticky-toffee pudding or a chocolate fondant with pistachio cream. Sunday brings a choice of at least four home-cooked joints, sometimes seasonal game, with a vegetarian option cooked to match.
The community shop and café is one of what the parish calls its Big Five, alongside the church, school, pub and hall. It is run by a regular team, Jo, Becky and Andrew among them, and does breakfast croissants and pastries, hot pasties, sausage rolls, bacon sandwiches, soup, toasted sandwiches and homemade cakes and traybakes. At one point it had a Longborough gin made for it.
Out at Ganborough, a short way along the A424, Cotswold Barn is a café and gift shop that has traded since 2014. There is a dog-friendly area in the barn, a dog-free conservatory, and outdoor seating with a view over the hills. The menu runs to a full English, a pork-pie ploughman's, a Lashford sausage-and-chutney sandwich, back bacon with Somerset Brie and cranberry, and a Cotswold cream tea.
The village stands on a hillside above the Evenlode valley, between about 450 and 784 feet, which accounts for both the long views out and the climb up from the surrounding field paths. A seven-mile circuit links Batsford, Bourton-on-the-Hill, Longborough and Sezincote over roughly three and a half hours, taking in three country-house landscapes. Batsford Arboretum, on the same loop, holds the largest private collection of trees and shrubs in the country. Sezincote itself is an Indian-inspired house of two hundred years' standing, with a ravine garden of temples, grottoes, waterfalls and pools; it opens on limited days, and dogs other than assistance dogs are not let in.
St James is Grade I and medieval in its bones, twelfth to fifteenth century, with a Sezincote Chapel added by C. R. Cockerell in the 1820s. Eight winged gargoyles run beneath the tower parapet, there is a mass dial beside the south porch, and a fourteenth-century bellcote carries carved faces at its corners. Inside, a medieval knight lies in effigy with a dog at his feet and two angels supporting his pillow, near the canopied tomb of William Leigh, who died in 1631, and his wife Elizabeth, with their children carved around them.
The Leighs held the place for a long time. Two medieval manors were combined and became the property of Hailes Abbey; at the Dissolution in 1539 they passed to Thomas Leigh, a former Lord Mayor of London, and the estate stayed intact until it was sold in 1921. When the Domesday surveyors reached Longborough they counted twenty-five households and valued the whole of it at seven pounds, down from twenty a generation before.
The village's most unlikely export is opera. In 1991 Martin and Lizzie Graham began staging two operas a year in a temporary theatre inside a small stable block in the grounds of their home at Banks Fee. It grew into an independent charity with a purpose-built five-hundred-seat opera house, and in 2013 it mounted a complete Wagner Ring Cycle on a modest budget. The critic Rupert Christiansen wrote that "without big budgets, production gimmicks or star names, Wagner's vision has been honestly and thrillingly honoured." The Grahams' daughter, Polly, took over as artistic director in 2018.
Moreton-in-Marsh, about three miles away, has the nearest station and a broader choice of shops and town services; Stow-on-the-Wold is a similar distance in the other direction, with the Fosse Way running between them. Buses through the village are community services on set days, a Tuesday run to Moreton and Chipping Norton and a Thursday circuit round the Oddingtons and Stow, so it is worth checking the day before you rely on one.
At the edge of the village, Ashwell Spring keeps an Anglo-Saxon name that people here read as Aesc's Well. It once filled the village buckets and the farmers' water carts, and even after the mains arrived they went on drinking from it, until the 1970s, when the water was finally declared unfit.
