North Nibley

From crossroads to escarpment

The Black Horse Inn sits at the village crossroads, popular with walkers coming down off the hill or steeling themselves to go up it. The Cotswold Way runs straight through North Nibley, and this 16th-century pub is a good place to break the walk. There is a real fire inside, a beer garden at the back and a sunny patio at the front. The landlord is Jay, dogs are welcome, and alongside the traditional bar the kitchen turns out Indian food: butter chicken, lamb vindaloo, garlic chilli chicken, chicken or lamb jalfrezi, with takeaway if you would rather carry it home. Butcombe Original is the regular session bitter, kept beside a changing cask ale and a real cider.

Above the village, on the lip of the escarpment, stands the Tyndale Monument: a 111-foot tower completed in 1866. A spiral staircase of 121 steps climbs to views over the Severn Estuary. It commemorates William Tyndale, whose English translation of the New Testament was printed in 1526, and who was strangled and burned as a heretic a decade later. North Nibley was believed to be his birthplace when the site was chosen, though it is one of three Gloucestershire places that claim him, and the exact location remains uncertain.

Cider and community resolve

The village's other pub, the New Inn, sits down in the fold of land called Waterley Bottom, and opened in 1845 in a farm cottage whose front room once sold cider and vinegar to foundry workers. It still leads with cider — Gloucestershire Cider Pub of the Year three times over — and keeps a log-burner in the lounge, a terrace and a garden that featured in a Sunday Times list of the country's best. Dogs are welcome, and so are horses.

When the last shop was threatened in 2002, residents formed a company and bought it outright with single £25 shares, and it has since become a community hub. It is the kind of arrangement a place makes when it decides not to lose something.

Battlefield paths and St Martin’s

Walking is a major reason people come here. The Cotswold Way stage from Dursley to Wotton-under-Edge is about five miles: it climbs Stinchcombe Hill, drops through farmland into North Nibley, then rises steeply to the monument before crossing woodland and grassland beyond. For something shorter and stranger, a roughly three-mile circuit from St Martin's crosses Nibley Green, where on 20 March 1470 Thomas Talbot, Lord Lisle, led about 300 men from Wotton against William, Lord Berkeley's force of a thousand. Lisle was killed early on. The inheritance quarrel behind the fight dragged through the courts until 1609.

St Martin's itself is worth the few minutes it takes to look inside. The church is 15th-century, its tower dated 1632, and the chancel is a full High Victorian production: painted throughout by Clayton and Bell, with a gold-mosaic reredos by Powell and Son. There is a seven-bay tie-beam roof, an 18th-century oak pulpit and the Queen Anne royal arms of 1709. A monument shows Grace Smyth, who died in 1609, kneeling in the dress of her day; her husband John Smyth was the Berkeley family's surveyor.

Parish history and practical access

The parish appears in the record as "hnibban lege" in 940 and was long known for woollen cloth. On the ridge above sit the earthworks of Brackenbury Ditches, an Iron Age hillfort, and during the Second World War Nibley House held German and Italian prisoners of war. Roughly half the parish's households live scattered among outlying hamlets rather than in the village centre.

A car is the simplest way to get here for most: the B4060 runs through, the M5 is about five miles off at junction 14, and Cam & Dursley station is a similar distance, with the county's bookable Robin bus for those without wheels. Wotton-under-Edge is two miles one way, Dursley three the other, both with independent shops.

Cricket below the escarpment

Below the escarpment lies the recreation field, which the village describes, without much modesty, as "one of the most beautiful settings for a sports field in Britain." Cricket is played there through the summer months.