The Kings Arms occupies a 17th-century building with an early-16th-century doorway and a two-storey porch that keeps its original windows. It is closed for now. Sir Charles Hobhouse, who lives in the village, bought the freehold and leased it to the Beckford Group, with a reopening planned for September 2026. The last time the pub changed hands, in 2016, villagers took it over from the Muddy Duck and put the Kings Arms name back. Before you plan an evening around it, confirm the doors are open.
Monkton Farleigh stands on high ground between Bath and Bradford-on-Avon, mostly 600 to 700 feet up, with the land dropping away eastward to the A363 at Farleigh Wick. The houses are two-storey, built of rubble or coursed stone, many with tall Victorian chimneys, stone-mullioned windows and gables. Mature trees fold the conservation area into the fields around it. Writing a parish history in 1881, Hobhouse thought "probably in all Wiltshire there is no place where the combination of scenery - hill and valley, wood and stream, distance and home views is more varied and beautiful."
Walking is the main reason to be here. An 8-mile circular from the Kings Arms drops through farmland to the River Avon and the Dundas Aqueduct, follows the Kennet and Avon Canal past Claverton Pumping Station to Bathampton, then climbs back through Browne's Folly Nature Reserve. There are 315 metres of ascent, plus steps and stiles, so it is not a route for wheels; dogs are fine but need leads around livestock. A short detour reaches the Monk's Conduit, a 14th-century limestone building barely nine feet square, built to shelter the spring that once supplied the priory.
The village hall, opposite the school, opened in 1925 on land given by Hobhouse and put up by volunteers. It seats about fifty at tables and has a car park and garden. It is a place you hire rather than drop into.
For shops and a wider choice of food you go to Bradford-on-Avon, three or four miles off, which also has the canal and its own heritage walks. Further afield are the American Museum and Gardens at Claverton, with trails, open grounds and a garden deli, and Great Chalfield Manor, a 15th-century house with a moat, topiary and a spring-fed pond, shown by guided tour.
Bradford-on-Avon is also the nearest station, about three miles away, on GWR with step-free access to both platforms. The A363 Bath to Bradford-on-Avon road runs through Farleigh Wick; Bath is five and a half miles west. Bus 96 links the village to Bradford-on-Avon, but only on weekdays and, by one account, once a day, so check a timetable before you rely on it.
The reason the village exists is buried under the manor. A Cluniac priory of St Mary Magdalene was founded here about 1120-25, administered from Lewes until 1374, and dissolved in 1536; excavation traced its church, chapter house, cloister and hall. The Grade I manor now on the site is an 18th-century house that reused 12th-century priory carving, including a coffin lid with a cross cut into it. John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, died at the manor in 1571.
St Peter's Church carries the older work more plainly. Its north porch has an inner 12th-century doorway with chevron ornament and a scalloped capital, and the saddleback tower holds bells cast in 1623, 1724 and 1783. T. H. Wyatt rebuilt much of the rest in 1844.
Two things surface from the ground here. In 1980 a householder found an earthenware pot holding 3,466 Roman coins, running from the reign of Valerian I to the start of Diocletian's. And the Bath stone under the village, quarried hard through the 19th century, was approved in 1935 for one of three underground ammunition sub-depots, Monkton Farleigh among them, developed to keep the country's shells safe from bombing.
The Domesday surveyors found 24 households and eight plough teams, and valued the whole place at seven pounds.
On a clear day the view east is the one Hobhouse was talking about.
