Inside the front bar of The Bell there is a self-service wall of wine: dozens of bottles you can carry off to your table or take home, and more than twenty still and sparkling wines poured by the glass. The pub is run by Peter Austen, born in Gloucestershire, and it tries to be two things at once — the village local and a place people drive out to for dinner. The menu changes month by month, and the lamb and venison, the kitchen will tell you, usually come from a field or two away. Behind the main building there is a landscaped garden and a covered courtyard with its own bar and a pizzeria. Dogs are welcome throughout, on a short lead and off the furniture, and there is baby-changing, a children's menu and high chairs, though the pub is clear that it is not a play area. The Times, reviewing winter pubs, gave it one word: idyllic.
At the western edge of the village stands The Daneway Inn, a Wadworth pub the brewery steers walkers and cyclists towards. It began as three cottages built for the men who ran the Thames and Severn Canal. In 1807 the western one became the Bricklayers Arms, named after the bricklayers who lined the locks and stretches of Sapperton Tunnel; the other cottages lodged the tunnel leggers. It became a free house in 1955 and took the Daneway name. The car park was once the canal's summit lock.
Provisions mean a short drive to Cirencester, four and a half miles east, where the Corinium Museum keeps its Roman mosaics.
The canal explains much of what you walk past here. From the restored Coates portal, the Wysis Way and the Thames and Severn Way run 2.7 miles through Hayley Wood to the Daneway. The tunnel between the two portals — 3,817 yards long, and 213 feet down at its deepest — opened in 1789, and was the longest tunnel of any kind in England for twenty-two years. There was no towpath inside, so boats were legged through: two men lay on a plank across the bows and walked the boat along the walls, a crossing of about three and a half hours. Roof falls block it now, and it is closed to the public.
For a longer walk, Siccaridge Wood covers twenty-seven hectares of ancient woodland between Sapperton and Oakridge, with bluebells in spring, large wood-ant nests, and dormice in monitored boxes. Keep dogs on a lead and expect the lower paths to be muddy and steep; the flatter stony routes higher up are the easier option. A 5.8-mile circular from Oakridge takes in the village's Arts and Crafts buildings before returning through the woods.
Those buildings are the other reason people come. In 1893 Ernest Gimson and Sidney Barnsley persuaded Ernest Barnsley to join them here and build a craft community out of local people and local materials. They trained villagers as craftspeople, with a strong focus on furniture; Gimson himself learned to make ladder-back chairs from a travelling chair bodger. Lord Bathurst lent them Daneway House as a workshop. Gimson designed The Leasowes around 1903, and with Barnsley and Norman Jewson the village hall in 1912. Rodmarton Manor, a few miles off, was built and furnished by the same circle and can be visited in season.
The Church of St Kenelm is cruciform under a broach spire, its oldest stonework early twelfth century. The Atkyns family rebuilt much of it in the early eighteenth century, and when the old house at Sapperton Park was pulled down around 1730 its carved pew ends, panelling, gallery front and oak cornice were carried into the church. Inside there is a fifteenth-century font, linen-fold benches, and a run of monuments unusually rich for a village this size: the Poole tomb of 1574, with Sir Henry Poole and his family kneeling in marble, and Edward Stanton's reclining figure of Sir Robert Atkyns, the county historian, who died in 1711.
In 1086 the manor, recorded with neighbouring Frampton Mansell, was held by Robert of Tosny and worth sixteen pounds a year, up from fourteen twenty years before.
Getting here is straightforward enough. Kemble station is about four and a quarter miles off, on the Great Western line; the village sits just off the A419 between Stroud and Cirencester, and the demand-responsive Robin bus will stop at The Glebe or Sapperton School if you book it ahead.
In spring the lower woods fill with bluebells, and the ridge path leads to benches and a viewpoint, with the old canal lying south of the wood. It is a good place to sit for a while before the walk back up.
