The front bar of the Black Horse Inn still has its original flagstone floor, and in winter there is a fire in it. Beer and home-cooked food have been served here for more than a century, and Jo and her team run it now. The menu is short: steak and kidney pie, beer-battered cod with chips and mushy peas, Gloucester Old Spot sausages and mash. The specials follow the season, with local asparagus in spring and locally shot game once the weather turns. One recent diner called it "a reassuringly small seasonal menu cooked by a skilled chef." You are likely to meet one of the pub's dogs at some point. It is the only pub verified in Naunton.
Naunton is a narrow linear village on the floor of the Windrush Valley, strung along the river with the water never far from the road. It runs the better part of a mile, and parking should not be assumed, so if you are staying here it is worth working out where you can leave a car before you arrive rather than after. Cotswold stone, meadows, leats. The parish sits about five miles west of Stow-on-the-Wold and twelve east of Cheltenham, and most of it is a conservation area.
The building most worth walking to is the dovecote, a square, four-gabled structure of rubble stone standing down near the river rather than up on high ground, where dovecotes were usually built. Inside it once held around 1,200 nest holes; 903 are still open, the lowest five tiers having been blocked when brown rats reached the area. It is free to enter during daylight hours, and there is no parking at the site, so you reach it on foot.
It did not remain a dovecote. Someone converted it into a small water-powered mill, probably grinding animal feed, and in the late 1920s a turbine was installed that generated electricity for the Black Horse, the manor and two other houses. The arrangement lasted until the water pressure fell and the supply became unreliable. Mains power reached Naunton in 1948 and the turbine house was abandoned in the 1950s. Children can still see the nest holes, the mill leat and the restored machinery. The outbuilding beside it was altered to serve as a set for a BBC adaptation of Adam Bede.
Walking is the other reason to come. The official Guiting Power circular runs 6.3 miles through fields, woods and valley bottom, past the dovecote, the Windrush, a disused railway and the sites of three vanished medieval settlements, and it has stiles. For something longer, the Wardens' Way and the Windrush Way each run about thirteen miles and connect Winchcombe with Bourton-on-the-Water by different paths, so you can walk out on one and back on the other. Along the river you may see herons, dippers, kingfishers and the occasional egret, with flag iris and purple loosestrife in the wet meadow. Racehorses are trained up the hill: Nigel Twiston-Davies's yard at Grange Hill Farm produced Earth Summit, winner of the 1998 Grand National, and Bindaree, winner in 2002.
St Andrew's has thirteenth-century origins, a fifteenth-century tower and the tidy repairs of a Victorian restoration. Two painted sundials sit at the south-west corner of the tower; one is dated 1748, the other reads Lux Umbra Dei. Inside there is a traceried octagonal pulpit, a cross thought to be Anglo-Saxon, and a memorial to Ambrose Oldys, who died in 1720 and whose father was killed by Parliamentarians, a short line of Civil War carried into a quiet church.
The place is old and was never large. The Domesday commissioners found two villagers and three slaves here and valued the whole manor at two pounds, the same as it had been worth twenty years before. The nearest station is Moreton-in-Marsh, about ten miles off, and the village lies just off the B4068. The bookable North Cotswolds Robin will collect you from St Andrew's Church; check Traveline for any fixed-route service. Guiting Power, with its shop and café, is on the far side of the circular walk; Stow, Bourton-on-the-Water and the Slaughters are all within reach for a wider choice of shops and food.
The village hall keeps a lounge bar and a kitchen and runs the ordinary business of a small place, with Pilates, a baby-and-toddler group and a monthly breakfast, and once a year the recreation ground holds a Fun Day and Dog Show, with sports-day games and stalls.
