The Keepers Arms began as a gamekeeper's cottage, and parts of it are around three hundred years old. It is now a family-run free house with a cosy bar, open fires, four en-suite rooms and a sun terrace. The kitchen is broader than the building suggests, and has run to cider-battered haddock with garden or mushy peas, fries and curried tartare sauce, paneer-and-pea butter masala with rice and poppadoms, an onion-bhaji burger with mango chutney, sea bream with warm caponata, and lightly spiced lamb with roast vegetables and couscous, though the menu changes. The ales come from independent breweries, with St Austell Proper Job and Butcombe Original the regulars, though the hand pumps change. Dogs are welcome.
Quenington sits in the valley of the River Coln, eight miles east of Cirencester, with a green at its centre and a village hall beside it that runs coffee mornings and an Apple Day each October. The nearest shop is Coln Community Stores in Coln St Aldwyns, the next village along — a community-owned shop, café and Post Office that took the South West regional award for Best Shop and Post Office in 2026.
Reaching that shop is the main walk. The Two Villages River Walk is a two-mile circular that leaves the Keepers Arms, skirts Quenington Green and drops to the valley floor, crossing the Coln three times before climbing back over a steep hill. It takes most people under an hour and has no stiles, though the paths are unsurfaced. It passes a playground just below the green and a second in Coln St Aldwyns, with the community stores waiting halfway for anyone who wants to stop. From the Keepers Arms you can also strike out toward Bibury, four miles off, or follow the Coln Valley in the direction of Fairford.
The church is St Swithin's, with Norman doorways on both the north and south sides. The north tympanum shows the Harrowing of Hell. The south doorway is carved with guilloche, pellet and beakhead patterns, and its tympanum may be the earliest surviving depiction of the Coronation of the Virgin, ringed by the symbols of the Evangelists. Inside there is a late-16th-century font under a cover dated 1662, marble wall monuments and a 17th-century shield brass. The building was recorded by 1100 and known as St Mary's in the 12th century; it had become St Swithin's by 1735.
A short way off stands a dovecote at Knights Gate, with about six hundred angled nesting holes and a revolving ladder inside for reaching them. It is reputed to be the one recorded in 1338 as belonging to the Knights Hospitallers, though some put it two or three centuries later. The Hospitallers kept a preceptory here from 1193 until the Dissolution in 1540; it briefly reopened under Mary I and then went, leaving a gateway and some barn fabric behind. Quenington Court, an early-19th-century house, now stands on the site and is visible through the old gateway.
Water did the rest of the work. A Domesday corn mill became a fulling mill for cleaning wool, then gained a gig mill and a dye house; by 1738 it was making paper from rags, and did so until about 1880, which is how the rise beside it came to be called Rag Hill. The smithy was first recorded in 1678 and has stayed with the Collett family, who have lived in Quenington for more than two hundred and fifty years. When the Domesday commissioners came through, they valued the whole place at ten pounds, up from eight twenty years earlier, and counted forty-five households on the land.
Cirencester is eight miles west by car, for wider shops and services, and the practical railhead is Kemble, with its car park and Great Western trains. The 76 bus links the village with Fairford, Cirencester and Lechlade from The Green, though it is worth checking the timetable before you rely on it.
The front garden of the Keepers Arms is small. CAMRA called it popular with cyclists, ramblers and smokers. It is a good place to end a walk.
