Notgrove

The Village Hub and Essential Supplies

The Nuttery, at the centre of the village, is not quite a pub. It is a licensed café and bar in the community hub, and it keeps a Kune Kune pig called Mr Bean. The food is home-cooked from seasonal local produce: breakfasts, brunches, Sunday roasts, homemade cakes, and a seasonal pop-up dinner on Friday nights. The chef, Darren Bartlett, earned two rosettes by the age of twenty-three, became head chef at the New Inn at Coln St Aldwyn, and ran Hyde Barn near Stow before coming here. Dogs, children, cyclists and horses are all welcome, and the building is wheelchair accessible.

There is no shop on site. For a supermarket, a chemist, petrol or a takeaway you drive the three miles to Bourton-on-the-Water, which also has the River Windrush.

Pub Walks and the High Cotswold Landscape

If you want an actual pub, two are within walking distance. The Plough at Cold Aston is a mile and a half away by quiet lane or the edge of a crop field. The Black Horse at Naunton is the other, reachable on foot if you don't mind the walk.

Notgrove stands high in the Cotswold Hills at the head of a small valley, six kilometres west of Bourton and fourteen east of Cheltenham, reached off the A436 by a minor road. Around the manor, drystone-walled parkland drops steeply into Fish Pond Coppice, where three stream-fed ponds sit among the trees, then rises again to Shrubs Coppice. Medieval lynchets and old trackways survive in the park as low ridges in the grass.

Estate Paths and St Bartholomew

Walking is a major draw the estate promotes. The Macmillan Way, the Diamond Way and the Gloucestershire Way all cross or border the estate, which runs to fifteen hundred acres of high farmland with marked routes over tracks and open grass. Wildlife includes hares, buzzards and owls. The estate keeps alpacas, Highland cattle, donkeys and goats, and there is a tennis court, a games room, play areas and a football pitch for guests, with quad biking, foraging and falconry available to book. Beside the village is Elizabeth's Wood, three hectares planted with more than three and a half thousand native trees for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee in 2022.

St Bartholomew is Grade I and mostly twelfth-century, its north arcade three bays with scalloped capitals, remodelled in the fourteenth century and restored in 1873. On the east end, a figure of the Crucifixion that may be Saxon stands in a fifteenth-century niche. Inside are a twelfth-century tub font with cable moulding, a fourteenth-century reredos still holding crimson and green paint under later defacement, a Virgin and Child in glass from around 1300, early-seventeenth-century pews, glass by Clayton and Bell, and effigies of the Whittington family dated about 1585 and 1630. The old manor west of the church was their seat; they are said, cautiously, to have descended from Dick Whittington.

Manor History, the Long Barrow and Arrival

The manor belonged to the bishops of Worcester from Domesday until the Reformation, then passed through a run of families and two Oxford colleges before Cyril Cunard bought it in 1908 and laid out the formal gardens with his wife. Older still is the long barrow on the ridge, a Cotswold–Severn chambered tomb about fifty metres long, excavated in 1881 and again in the 1930s. It held an adult man in an unusual dome-shaped chamber and, along a twelve-metre gallery, the remains of others, with animal bones, pottery and a bone tool. The finds are in Cheltenham.

Practical arrival options include Cheltenham Spa, twelve miles off, and Kingham for trains from London; a taxi arranged in advance saves waiting. Pulhams' 832 service is listed as running through Notgrove, though the exact stop is unclear, so check their timetable before you rely on one.

Nearby Outings and a Return to Mr Bean

Northleach, with the parish church they call the Cathedral of the Cotswolds, is four miles away, and Cotswold Farm Park and its rare breeds a mile beyond that. Back in the village, Mr Bean is unbothered by any of it.