Outside the Butchers Arms there is a rail for tying up horses. The pub is 18th-century Cotswold stone, with an oak-beamed bar, a wood burner, an open fire and three linked dining rooms, and the name is literal: the building was a grazier's premises and slaughterhouse before it ever poured a pint. The garden faces south and is furnished, in part, with seating made from old wooden cable drums.
Sharp's Doom Bar is the regular cask bitter, and the changing taps tend to run to Stroud Budding, Uley Pale and Wye Valley Butty Bach. The spring menu covers tempura king prawns with chilli and spring-onion salad, beer-battered haddock with chunky chips and pancetta pea puree, baked salmon with new-potato salad and avocado salsa, king-prawn linguine, courgette tagliatelle in Cajun cream, and a homemade seasonal pie. Dogs are welcome, with a water firkin and bowl in the garden, and children get toys, games and highchairs. Jonathan Dance, reviewing the open-fire back room after a Sunday roast, called it "so cosy and quaint."
The other address worth knowing is Ollie's Shop and Post Office, at Cherry Oakes. It carries Cotswold honeys, jams and beers, Godsell's cheeses, Woodlands Farm yogurts, Winestone's ice cream, Stroud Brewery beer, British meat and vegetables, handmade cakes, Hobbs and Dangerfields bread and the award-winning Plenty Pies, alongside cards by local artists. For a village six miles from Stroud on the western edge of the Cotswolds, it is a lot of shop.
That edge is the point of the place. Oakridge sits above the Golden Valley, and the walks below go down before they come back up. The Village and Valley circular, 5.5 miles and around two and a half hours from the pub door, drops steeply through mature beech woods to the valley floor, crosses two nature reserves and passes industrial remains, with bluebells if you time it right. A longer 5.8-mile loop crosses the fields to Sapperton and returns along the River Frome and the old Thames and Severn Canal. The Ramblers' Linking the Lynches route, 6.5 miles, strings together Oakridge Lynch, France Lynch, Strawberry Banks, Chalford and the towpath, with several steep climbs and muddy stretches; sturdy footwear is sensible.
Most people arrive by the minor roads in from the Stroud–Cirencester direction. The Cotswold Green 8B bus stops at The Crescent and links the village with Bisley and Stroud, but it runs only a handful of weekday journeys and none on Sundays, so check the timetable before counting on it — it is a way in rather than a way home from an evening at the pub. The nearest station is Stroud, about six miles off.
St Bartholomew's stands below the green, beside the school, looking out over the valley. It went up in 1837 at the instigation of Thomas Keble, vicar of Bisley, to designs by Robert Stokes of Cheltenham, and was reworked in the 1850s by Henry Woodyer. It is a plain Gothic Revival composition of nave, chancel, tower and porch, faced outside in ashlar, with one unexpected flourish inside: the walls are decorated with "barber poling."
The school beside it opened in 1872, when many local children still left early to work at the nearby silk mill. Two of the village's more celebrated residents came a little later. Alfred and Ada Louise Powell, the Wedgwood designers, settled at Gurners Farm in 1902, hand-painted thousands of pieces and trained the company's paintresses before selling up in 1916; they belonged to the Arts and Crafts circle that gathered around Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers in these valleys.
For somewhere this quiet, there is a fair amount to do. The village keeps a cricket ground, tennis court, playground, allotments and a hall that now runs cinema nights on a 3.5-metre screen with surround sound. The Oakridge Village Show takes over the first Saturday in September, and the school holds its May Revels on the green.
The rest of the year, the surest sign of the village stirring is a row of muddy boots outside the Butchers Arms and a dog asleep by the fire.
