Oddington

The Fox and the Two Oddingtons

The Fox at Oddington has a wood-fired oven and the log fires that reviewers keep mentioning before they get round to the food. It sits on the High Street in Lower Oddington, a 19th-century inn with flagged floors and exposed stone, now run as part of the Daylesford Organic collection. The menu runs from wood-fired pizza to Hereford sirloin on the bone, with ingredients coming off the Daylesford farm and its sister farm at Wootton. There are rooms upstairs done out with equestrian detailing, and a separate four-bedroom house across the street called the Coachman's. Thursday is DJ and pizza night. It's rated 4.1 on Tripadvisor across more than 800 reviews, and it's in the Michelin Guide, though opinions on the food are more mixed than the ones on the fires.

Oddington is really two villages a mile apart. Lower Oddington is compact, sat on the old main road; Upper Oddington straggles uphill beside a brook called the Henbrook. The whole civil parish held 417 people at the last census, down from a peak of 588 in 1861.

The Horse & Groom and Local Provisions

Up in Upper Oddington is the Horse & Groom, a 16th-century inn with a steak and seafood grill inside it called the Henbrooks. Norman Liu and Warren Turner bought it in 2019. The kitchen does seabass, scallops and a Sunday roast the reviewers single out, with a weekly-changing guest ale usually from a local brewery and a long list of gins. It's on the Top 50 Gastropubs list, rated 4.3 on Tripadvisor and 4.7 with OpenTable diners. Not a cheap night out, by most accounts, but people say it earns it.

There's no shop, butcher or bakery in either village. Daylesford's farmshop is close to the north-east, and Stow-on-the-Wold is two miles off for anything else, with Moreton-in-Marsh and its Tuesday market a couple of miles further on.

St Nicholas' and the Doom

Half a mile from the houses, down a long lane in a wooded vale, stands St Nicholas', the old church. Philip Wilkinson calls the setting "a trip down a long lane to a spot far away from houses and wonderfully quiet." The reason people make the trip is on the north wall of the nave: a Doom painting from around 1340, roughly 32 feet long and 15 feet high, reckoned perhaps the largest in Britain. Christ sits enthroned with an orb of the world between his feet; angels sound trumpets to wake the dead; on the right, devils work bellows on hellfire and there's a gibbet with a hanging figure, which is unusual. It was whitewashed at the Reformation and only rediscovered in 1912. A newer church, the Church of the Ascension, was built between the two villages in 1852 because the old one was inconveniently far.

Footpaths through the Valley

The walking is the reason to stay put. Circular routes link the Oddingtons using the Macmillan Way, Monarch's Way and Gloucestershire Way, and one runs on to Adlestrop — the village of Edward Thomas's poem — and the Daylesford estate.

Domesday and Edward Chamberlayne

The Domesday surveyors valued the place at six pounds in 1066. Twenty years later it was worth ten. Edward Chamberlayne, who wrote a book called The Present State of England, was born here in 1616, which for a village this quiet is about as busy as it gets.