Sheepscombe

Arfur and the Butchers Arms

The carved sign outside the Butchers Arms shows a butcher drinking a pint with a pig tied to his leg. It broke in half after a fall and was put back together by two regulars in 2020, which is why the village calls it Arfur. The pub behind it dates to around 1670, and deer killed in what was once a royal deer park were hung in the room that is now the bar. That is where the name comes from.

It is a free house, and it still works as a pub for drinkers as much as for people who have come to eat. Dogs are allowed on leads in the bar and the garden. The cask ales rotate through local and regional breweries, one hand-pull is kept for a guest farmhouse cider, and Stowford Press is the steady draught. The kitchen cooks pub food with local produce where it can: beer-battered fish and chips, a Butchers beef burger, spiced sweetcorn fritters, pork-belly bites glazed with barbecue, soy and honey, and piggy chips piled with chorizo, bacon, spring onion and cheddar. The Butchers Rarebit comes under ham, mushroom and a mustard-cheddar topping.

Laurie Lee in the hidden valley

Two shepherd's huts in the pub's grounds are named Annie and Rosie. Laurie Lee's mother was Annie, and Rosie is the Rosie of Cider with Rosie; Lee lived locally and drank here.

No main road runs through Sheepscombe. It lies in a narrow, steep-sided valley behind the Cotswold scarp, east of Painswick, and you reach it down winding lanes between beech woods that large lorries are warned off. The stone houses follow the combe, and the valley opens west toward Painswick. Jack's Green, Cockshoot and Longridge make up the rest of the parish.

Walks from the pub and St John's Church

Six walks start from the pub door. The shortest is a mile to Far End; then Saltridge Wood at two and a quarter miles, Cranham at four, a six-mile loop through Foston's Ash and Cranham, seven miles to Painswick, and the thirteen-mile run of the Cotswold Way. Woodland paths are waymarked with yellow arrows. A separate circular of five and a half miles links Painswick, Sheepscombe and a hamlet called Paradise, and takes about three hours over steep and uneven ground that calls for a good level of fitness.

The church of St John the Apostle was built in 1820 to John Wight's design and altered in 1872 by Francis Niblett. It is limestone ashlar under stone-slate roofs, with a small west tower over the porch, a king-post nave roof, pitch-pine pews and an octagonal font dated 1849. Around the nineteenth-century west door runs a carved inscription: "The Rich and the Poor meet together. The Lord is the maker of them all." The parish marked the building's two hundredth year in 2020.

Provisions and village life

For provisions there is a community market garden growing seasonal fruit and vegetables, sold singly or as weekly boxes of six to eight kinds, with delivery. For a shop, there's Painswick, which has a general store and a pharmacy, or the road toward Bisley, where Stancombe Beech Farm sells produce and the Green Shop stocks Hobbs House bread. Stroud, the nearest railway station, has supermarkets and a Saturday farmers' market; route 228 links it to the village through Painswick and Cranham on Thursdays, though the timetable is worth checking before you rely on it.

The village keeps itself occupied. There is a play area open to everyone, a village hall with a table-tennis table, and a home-made pantomime that has run for years. Frank Mansell, a Gloucestershire poet and friend of Laurie Lee who lived at a house called Salt Box, published his Cotswold Ballads in 1974 and played cricket for the village. Painswick Rococo Garden is a short drive off, the only complete surviving rococo garden in the country, laid out in the 1740s with follies and long views, and dogs are welcome there on short leads.

Cricket at the Laurie Lee Field

The cricket has been played on the same hilltop field since 1896, known as the Laurie Lee Field.