Saintbury Co. occupies a group of 17th-century barns on a farm at the edge of the village, and it sells two things that do not usually share a roof: Italian coffee and architectural salvage. You can order a cup and a slice of homemade cake, supplied by Cotswold Larder, then browse antique, retro and painted furniture, garden benches, chairs, stools, sofas and the general bric-a-brac of a salvage yard. There is parking, a public footpath running up the farm track, and a stated welcome for visitors no matter how furry.
For a pub, you go to the neighbouring villages. The New Inn at Willersey is a 17th-century Cotswold pub with beams, a flagstone floor and a log fire, and the back bar keeps skittles, pool and darts. Its paddock is described as suitable for children of the two- and four-legged kind. The kitchen now works differently from most: local caterers and food pop-ups use it, with takeaway suggested when none is on. At Broadway, the Horse and Hound is a low-ceilinged 16th-century pub with a bar, snug and log fire, serving house pies, Sunday roast, steak and changing specials built around fresh fish, game and kitchen-garden produce.
Walking is a strong reason to come this way. The church stands where the Cotswold edge drops away, and two waymarked circuits pass through it. The longer, an official 10.7-mile loop, runs from Chipping Campden to Broadway along the Cotswold Way and returns through the Foxhill estate and Saintbury churchyard, crossing fields, stiles and a small stream. A shorter 6.8-mile circuit from Fish Hill climbs the escarpment north and east of Broadway and finishes with the ascent to Broadway Tower. If you want less, there is a field walk from Willersey up to the church, through pasture with grazing livestock and long views over the Vale of Evesham.
Saintbury does not gather into a centre. Its houses are scattered along the twists of the hillside, among orchards and sloping pasture, on the north-west edge of the oolitic limestone. H. J. Massingham put it as "Houses here and houses there that is Saintbury." From the churchyard the ground falls west to the Vale of Evesham, with Bredon Hill and the Malverns beyond.
St Nicholas' has a slender broach spire, visible from around the escarpment, and is a local landmark. It is Grade I listed, and the fabric spans the medieval and later periods. Two Norman doorways survive, the south one with a lozenge-carved tympanum, and a sundial set into the wall is thought to be 11th-century. Inside are 18th-century box pews, a 15th-century octagonal font, medieval glass and 17th-century wall paintings, consolidated after damp brought the plaster close to collapse. The Arts and Crafts work ties the church to nearby Chipping Campden: a north-chapel screen by Ernest Gimson, a reredos by Alec Miller, and, until it was moved to the Court Barn museum, a chandelier by C. R. Ashbee. The Churches Conservation Trust looks after it now. The path up is stepped and sloping, and there is no heating, water or toilet, which is worth knowing before a winter visit.
People have lived on this slope for a long time. An earthwork complex south-west of the church appears to have begun in the late Iron Age, gained Romano-British stone buildings, and was still maintained into the ninth century, when a lordly centre developed here and, probably, the name with it: Sǣwine's burh. The Domesday scribes recorded thirty-one households. At the crossroads north of the village stands Saintbury Cross, its stepped 15th-century base carrying a later shaft and head; funeral processions are said to have rested here before the last climb to the church door.
The novelist Algernon Gissing knew the place well enough to write it into fiction as "Wancote" and to give it two chapters of a book on Gloucestershire footpaths. In 1887 he fell into conversation with William Smith, who was breaking stone at the parish quarry: Saintbury's sexton, parish clerk, bell-ringer and road-mender.
The field path from Willersey still climbs to the church through fields of grazing sheep.
