Miserden

The carpenter's shop that became a pub

The Carpenters Arms has a five-foot inglenook fireplace and, until about a century ago, was a carpenter's shop rather than a pub. The oak beams are still in place. So is the kitchen garden, which grows much of what turns up on the menu, and the menu changes daily with the season. It leans on the surrounding fields: steak-and-ale pie with mash, mushy peas and gravy; Miserden lamb burgers with mint dip; breast of Miserden lamb with butternut-squash and sweet-potato mash. There is homemade chicken madras with chutney, and a butternut-squash and sweet-potato Wellington for anyone skipping the meat. On Sundays it is John Hinds' Sheepscombe topside of beef and Sue and Aubrey's Miserden leg of lamb, both named on the board like the neighbours they are.

Dogs and children are welcome. The pub keeps a selection of real ales and, less usually, eight ciders; it was Stroud CAMRA's Cider Pub of the Year in 2021. In 2015 the village stood in for Slad in the BBC's adaptation of *Cider with Rosie*, with the pub among the buildings pressed into service. Samantha Morton starred and Timothy Spall narrated.

Daytime stops and waymarked walks

For daytime supplies there is Little Ginger at Miserden, a cafe and deli run from a food trailer in the garden grounds: hot and cold drinks, ice creams, snacks and award-winning homemade cakes. The village shop and Post Office sit at Brompton Cottage, where Laura runs the counter and you can post a parcel, withdraw cash or pay in a cheque.

Three waymarked walks start from the estate. The shortest, the Lake Walk, is 1.8 km through the arboretum and around the lake, where a kingfisher is a possibility. The Valley Walk is 3.3 km of open arable fields and a view down the valley. The Farm Walk is longer at 6.5 km, on a quieter route to remote views, with dogs kept on leads for the livestock. For something bigger, a six-mile circular through Duntisbourne and Winstone starts opposite the Carpenters Arms, taking in woods, fields and a few steep slopes over about three hours.

Garden walls and layers of history

The Garden at Miserden occupies a bluff above the River Frome, which is dammed below the house into a lake about 200 metres long, possibly on the line of medieval fishponds recorded in 1233. There is a yew walk, mixed borders, a two-hundred-year-old sycamore that has grown straight through a Cotswold-stone wall, and a mulberry said by the estate to date from 1620. The paths are mostly gravel, with some steps and uneven ground; dogs are not admitted except assistance dogs. The house itself is not open.

The Sandys family began the present house in 1620. A fire in 1919 gutted much of it, and Edwin Lutyens helped rebuild and reshape the house and its grounds in 1920 and 1921. The park is older than any of it, documented from 1297, and the ground where Henry VIII spent a day hunting in 1535. Above the gardens a motte still rises about ten metres, the remains of a castle first recorded in 1146.

Saxon doorways and country-lane arrivals

The Church of St Andrew is mostly eleventh-century, with a twelfth-century chancel and a fifteenth-century tower. Two Saxon doorways survive in the nave, each with a pointed fourteenth-century doorway inserted underneath. Inside there is a round Norman font and a close group of monuments: alabaster effigies of Sir William Sandys, who died in 1640, and Margaret Culpeper, who died in 1644, laid out with their children, and a painted stone figure of William Kingstone, who died in 1614. In the Domesday survey of 1086 the place was called Greenhampstead and counted twenty-five households.

The village sits high on the west side of the wooded Frome valley, and getting here means country lanes. The A417 runs about four kilometres east; Stroud, the nearest station, is about a thirteen-minute drive west. Buses are scarce, a Thursday service through Painswick and a Saturday one to Stroud, both stopping by the shop and the pub, so it is worth checking the timetable before you rely on either. Painswick, and its rococo garden, is on that Thursday route.

One last chance of a kingfisher

If you are quiet, you may be lucky enough to see a kingfisher.