The Woolpack sits on the edge of the Slad Valley, its terraces covered in grape vines and looking out over valley and Cotswold views. Inside there is a fireside tavern, a snug and a dining room, and in summer the dining room moves outdoors under the vines, where the chefs sometimes cook on a Josper grill.
The kitchen changes its menu daily and grows some of what it serves in a walled garden. Adam Glover's cooking runs from pub staples to more careful British plates: smoked cod's roe with onion rings, pickled sea bass with potatoes, shallots and horseradish, onglet with chips and peppercorn sauce, confit duck leg with mashed swede and red cabbage, braised lamb shoulder with soft polenta and green sauce. There is usually something for people not eating meat, such as a pumpkin, chestnut and farro stew.
The pub pours real ales, craft beer and cider. The sculptor Daniel Chadwick bought it in 1999 and rebuilt the kitchen in 2015, though the building itself has more than three hundred years behind it and wears the age lightly.
Across the village, Holy Trinity is a limestone church of 1831 by Charles Baker of Painswick, reconstructed by Benjamin Bucknall in 1869. It began as a chapel of ease to Painswick and opened for worship in 1834. Inside there is a four-bay arcade, a stone floor, an octagonal font under a tall pyramidal cover, and a pulpit. Laurie Lee is buried in the churchyard, and a stained-glass window and a small display inside remember him.
Most of what brings people to Slad is out of doors. The Laurie Lee Wildlife Way is a circular walk of about five and a half miles through three wildlife reserves in the valley, with steep and uneven ground in places. Laurie Lee Wood, three hectares of ancient woodland once owned by the Lee family, has bluebells and wild garlic in spring and wooden posts along the path carrying lines from Lee's writing. Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust bought it after more than a thousand people gave to an appeal, and opened it in 2013 on what would have been Lee's ninety-ninth birthday; his widow Kathy and daughter Jessy were there. Swift's Hill, steeper again, is ten hectares of grassland with more than 130 wildflower species, thirteen of them orchids, and twenty-nine kinds of butterfly; on a clear day the view reaches Wales. Cattle graze it from April to October and dogs must stay on leads.
Slad lies about two miles from Stroud along the B4070, with Slad Brook running along the floor of the valley below the road. Stroud has the nearest railway station. Buses come rarely: the 65A calls at the Woolpack and the war memorial on Saturdays, and the 228 passes through on Thursdays. Check both before you count on them.
The valley is the one Lee wrote about in Cider with Rosie. He arrived in 1917 at the age of three, went to the village school, and after some years away came back to live here in the early 1960s. He died in 1997 at Little Court, the cottage behind the Woolpack, with his wife and daughter beside him. Two years earlier he had joined a campaign, which succeeded, against building houses in the valley he immortalised in his writing.
Rose Buckland, who by then had said publicly that she was the Rosie of the book, remembered haymaking and farmers' cider carried in stone jars: "They were absolutely marvellous days." The school he went to, the pub he made famous and the churchyard where he lies stand close together in the village, near the bottom of the same valley.
