Rodmarton

A House and Garden Made Together

On the downpipes of Rodmarton Manor, the lead has been worked into animals and flowers, and here and there you can pick out a date and the initial B. Much about the house tells you it was made by hand: locally obtained limestone, shaped by local craftsmen, built over about twenty years. Claud and Margaret Biddulph commissioned it from the Arts and Crafts architect Ernest Barnsley in 1909, moved in by 1915, saw it largely finished in 1926, and had the chapel completed in 1929 under Norman Jewson. Inside are pieces made by the people who built the place around them: furniture by the Barnsley brothers, Ernest Gimson and Peter Waals.

The manor sits at the southern edge of the village, its gardens running up against open farmland on three sides. From here the land falls away gently towards the Marlborough Downs. The garden was laid out as part of the house rather than added afterwards, a run of outdoor rooms divided by stone walls and hedges across about four hectares. In front, a forty-metre circle of grass was set into the forecourt, partly meant to stand in for a village green.

Seasonal Food and Country Walking

The gardens are a principal attraction, and in season the manor runs a tearoom doing light lunches: quiche, sausage rolls, salad. At Frampton Mansell, near the A419, Jolly Nice is a family-run farm shop with a café, a bar and a drive-through. It works with more than seventy local producers and cooks from scratch; the Day Boat Fish and Chips is a regular fixture, and there is an ice-cream parlour.

Walking starts from the church door. A six-mile circular route to Tarlton and back, put together by the Cotswold Voluntary Wardens, begins outside St Peter's and picks up stretches of the Macmillan and Monarch's Ways, taking in views of Rodmarton and Hazleton Manors. It is rated for moderate fitness with some steep going, and takes around three and a half hours. Shorter and stranger is the walk to Windmill Tump. From the crossroads you follow Oathill Lane towards Hazleton, park in a lay-by about half a mile along, and cross 250 metres of field. Expect mud.

Long Barrow and Parish Church

The tump is an early Neolithic chambered tomb, built somewhere between 4000 and 3500 BC, with a false entrance that leads nowhere. An excavation in 1939 found thirteen skeletons and leaf-shaped flint arrowheads. When two trees came down in the storms of 1987, investigators reached a chamber no one had recorded before, a large capstone, and the bones of a child. Roman pottery and coins of Claudius Gothicus turned up here too, thousands of years after the tomb was sealed.

St Peter's, in the middle of the village, is older than it first looks. The foundation is probably Norman, with work surviving from the 13th and 14th centuries and restorations in 1862 and 1884. A short tower rises from the south transept under a recessed octagonal spire. On a quoin of the south-west porch someone once scratched a mass dial to read the hour by the sun. Inside are arch-braced collar-beam roofs in both side chapels, wall tablets to the Lysons family, and a large marble monument to John Coxe, who died in 1730. A fragment of interlaced Celtic cross, found reused as a corner-stone during repairs in 1926, was interpreted by rector F. W. Parkinson as a trace of a Saxon church on the site.

From Redmertone to the Robin

In the Domesday survey the place appears as Redmertone, with six recorded households. The village today has a school and a village hall.

Getting here means minor roads about a kilometre north of the A433, with Tetbury seven kilometres to the south-west and Cirencester nine to the north-east. The nearest station is Kemble, and the county's pre-booked Robin minibus stops at St Peter's Church in both directions.

Margaret Biddulph’s Village Green

Of Margaret Biddulph, who made the garden, the art historian John Rothenstein called her "the animating and directing force." Her forty-metre grass circle is still out there in front of the house, meant to stand in for a village green.