Radway

Voices beneath the ridge

Two wind-up audio boxes stand in Radway. One is at the corner where the main road meets West End; the other is by the bus stop opposite the Village Hall. You turn the handle and they tell you about the battle fought on the ridge above.

The ridge is Edge Hill, and Radway sits at the foot of it — a spring-line village of about 250 people at the north-eastern edge of the Cotswolds National Landscape. Mature trees and layered hedges hide most of it on the approach, so that from some directions the spire of St Peter's is the first thing you see. Around the houses there is grazed parkland and the corrugated survival of ridge-and-furrow.

The Castle and nearby provisions

The pub is not in the village. It is up on the summit, and it is a castle. Sanderson Miller, who owned Radway Grange, built himself an octagonal castellated Gothick tower here in the 1740s — Historic England dates it to about 1746–47, while Hook Norton says work began in 1742 and it opened in 1750. It became an inn in 1822 and the Hook Norton Brewery bought it in 1922. It is now the Castle at Edgehill, a Hook Norton pub run by Mark Higgs, with a garden and a small covered terrace looking out over the neighbouring counties. The food is home-cooked; one visitor, Yvonne, summed the place up as "Stunning views and really good food." The tower is still sometimes called the Round Tower, or Radway Tower.

For everyday shopping you go to nearby Kineton, which has a bakery, a butcher, a Co-op, a post office and cafés. Corner Cottage Bakery and the butcher H C Lewis are both there. Carpenters Farm Shop and Butchers sits out on the B4100, between the Warmington and Shotteswell turns.

St Peter's and the battle

St Peter's is younger than it looks. It was built in 1866 to a Gothic Revival design by Charles E. Buckeridge, using stone carried down from the dilapidated medieval church at West End. It is coursed Hornton ironstone, with an aisled nave, a three-bay chancel, a west tower and a broach spire. Four panels of 16th- and 17th-century Flemish glass, said to have come from the Edgehill tower, survive in the south aisle, and the re-set monuments inside include a medieval priest, Sanderson Miller himself, and Captain Henry Kingsmill, killed at Edgehill in 1642.

The church also holds a free permanent exhibition about that battle — artefacts, films, information boards, archaeological surveys, deployment plans and interactive displays, laid out for families as much as for historians. The Battle of Edgehill, fought on 23 October 1642, was the first major set-piece of the English Civil War: some 14,000 Royalists held the ridge, an almost equal Parliamentary army faced them, and by dusk neither had won. Below the Castle at Edgehill an old stone seat sits beside a footpath, looking out over the Royalist ground and the grange landscape.

Paths, landscape and the private Grange

Walkers have a proper circuit from the village: a 5.4-mile loop, graded easy to moderate, that climbs steeply through woodland to the Centenary Way, picks up part of the Battlefields Trail and takes in Ratley and Arlescote before dropping back. The paths beside Townsend Farm and Radway Grange are steep; the one from West End past the old church site to King John's Lane can be muddy after horses have used it. Upton House, National Trust, is close by, with its own walk up to the Edge Hill viewpoint.

Radway Grange, where Miller reshaped the landscape, is private and not open to visitors. Henry Fielding is said to have read part of Tom Jones at a house party there before it was published, and ancestors of George Washington are supposed to have lived in the house. The Domesday surveyors recorded 33 households and valued the three holdings at four pounds and fifteen shillings.

Connections and a final turn of the handle

Banbury station is about eight miles away, with parking and trains to London Marylebone; the 76A bus runs through to Stratford and Banbury, Monday to Saturday — check the live timetable before travel. When you leave, the last thing to do is turn the handle on one of those audio boxes and let it finish its sentence.