The By Brook runs through the bottom of Slaughterford. The village is a scatter of stone houses in a wooded angle of the valley, reached by minor lane and then, for the church, on foot across a field. The brook is about twelve miles long from its source to the Bristol Avon at Bathford, and twenty watermill sites once lined it. Weirs, sluices, leats and the stumps of wheels give the valley much of its shape.
The walking is the reason to book a week here rather than a night. The Biddestone Heritage Trail is a 6.6-mile circuit with about 616 feet of climb, rated moderate, on rights of way and lanes with some steep pitches, mud and stiles. It drops from Biddestone into Slaughterford, passes Chapps Mill, crosses the brook and goes through St Nicholas's churchyard before climbing Common Hill to Ford and turning back past Rag Mill. The best stretch is along the water from Ford: flood meadow, a footbridge over a weir, sluices, then two more footbridges into the woods at Rag Mill. One short road section has no pavement and can be busy, so keep the children close there.
No pub trades in Slaughterford itself, so the eating happens in the villages either side. The White Hart at Ford is a 16th-century coaching inn with eleven bedrooms, run by Tamas and his team, with a cobbled terrace beside the By Brook and trees for shade. The kitchen sends out Brixham hake with tomato, broad bean and radish salad; a Slimbridge chicken and woodland-herb pie; harissa cauliflower steak with roasted-garlic hummus; cyder-battered haddock and chips; and a Wiltshire strawberry and raspberry Eton mess. Young's Original is on the bar, dogs are welcome, and scenes from the original Doctor Dolittle were filmed here in the 1960s. In the other direction, the White Horse at Biddestone is an 18th-century village pub, dog- and family-friendly, taken on by Philip in the autumn of 2025; it was the George Inne in the mid-17th century, with a malthouse behind. John Aubrey noted of the well there that "the beere that is brewed of the well there is diuretique."
St Nicholas's is worth the field. The small two-stage west tower is 15th-century, with an embattled parapet, corner pinnacles and a three-sided stair turret; G. Forder of Winchester rebuilt the nave, chancel and south porch in 1823, and an inscription inside records that the work followed two centuries of disuse. Local accounts blame Cromwell's men, who are said to have wrecked the church in 1649, stripped the roof for firewood and used the ruin for artillery practice while the parish worshipped at Biddestone. The two centuries of disuse are well established; the rest is the version the village has kept.
The mills carry the rest of the history. Slaughterford Mill, also called Chapps Mill, fulled cloth until 1790, switched to paper in 1805, went briefly back to cloth, then made paper again from 1827 until W. Dowding closed it in 1994; its raised, widened reach is man-made, and the old buildings now hold small businesses. Rag Mill downstream was the first of three late-16th-century fulling mills and later held the valley's earliest paper machine; demolished in 1964, it still keeps a fifteen-foot undershot wheel from the 1890s and the remains of a rag boiler. The Grade II Old Brewery, now a house, still shows its courtyard ranges and a tall industrial chimney. Manor Farmhouse, dated 1753, carries the initials R.S. over its door.
Chippenham station, about five miles east on the Great Western line, is the nearest railhead. The lane in is narrow, and Biddestone has a regular Faresaver service. Castle Combe, Corsham Court and Lacock — abbey, tithe barn and the Fox Talbot Museum of early photography — are all nearby by car for the days it rains.
The name is argued over: sloe-thorn and ford, most likely, or a ford of slates from the local tile-stone. Either way, there's a ford to cross on the way in.
