The Swan stands on the green with low ceilings, open fires and wooden furniture that has been deliberately mismatched. It belongs to Thyme, the family-run estate, and its kitchen leans on the estate's garden and farm, so the menu moves with what has been picked. Recent menus have included cold-smoked trout with duck-egg cocotte, a chicken-and-ham-hock pie with colcannon mash, or braised lamb shoulder with peas and salsa verde, and sticky toffee pudding with butterscotch sauce to finish. Dogs are welcome and so are children, who get their own list of cheeseburger and fries, buttery pasta with Parmesan, or sausage and mash. There is a garden too.
The pub occupies a spot that has been feeding people for a long time. Thyme dates the site to a bakehouse serving bread and ale to farm workers in 1606; the parish records that the Swan Inn proper was made from an old bakehouse around 1840, its first landlord probably Thomas Lediard, who went bankrupt and saw the place sold in 1843 for £445.
For everyday needs there is the community shop and post office, run by volunteers in the village hall. It opened in January 1982, after deep snow had cut the village off, and is reckoned the oldest community shop in Gloucestershire. Alongside groceries, eggs and fruit and vegetables you will find Lynwood Bakery sourdough and homemade cake, with tea and coffee to go with it.
Thyme itself is the other reason people come. Caryn and Jerry Hibbert moved into Southrop Manor in 2002, took on the derelict farm buildings next door and restored them slowly into a cookery school, spa, boutiques, restaurant and bar; the cookery school began in the restored Tithe Barn and Olive Garden in 2007. The Ox Barn, formerly home to oxen, keeps its heavy beams, stone-rubble walls and high arches, and recent dishes have followed the same garden — Datterini tomatoes with salted ricotta and sourdough, a fennel-and-pea risotto with courgette and mozzarella, Iron Age pork with borlotti beans, shortcake with strawberries and sweet-cicely ice cream. It remains a working farm, run now by Caryn with her son Charlie and daughter Camilla.
The village sits in the valley of the River Leach, a tributary of the Thames, with the church beside the manor and the pub on the green. A good walk runs north along the Leach to Eastleach, about three and a quarter miles through fields and kissing gates, past Coate Farm and over Keble's stone clapper bridge, with two facing medieval churches at the far end and the river to keep you company on the way back to the Swan.
The Church of St Peter is Grade I and worth the short walk from the green. Its nave is early-12th-century, with Norman herringbone masonry, a round-headed north doorway and deeply splayed windows. The thing to find is the circular font, carved with arcading and figures around 1180 — Keble, curate here from 1823 to 1825, discovered it built into the south doorway. Inside there are two medieval piscinae, the effigies of Sir Thomas and Elizabeth Conway, and east-window glass of 1852 by Thomas Willement. Keble's pupils and visitors included John Henry Newman and Hurrell Froude, and the conversations they had here are counted among the beginnings of the Oxford Movement.
Getting here means minor roads from the Lechlade direction; Thyme asks drivers to keep to the village's 20 mph limit, since the lanes have little in the way of pavement. The Stagecoach 76 stops at the Swan on limited Monday-to-Saturday runs to Lechlade, Fairford and Cirencester, and the bookable Robin service will reach Kemble station. The nearest railway station is Shipton, though Kingham and Charlbury run a more frequent service.
Emma Henderson, reviewing the pub in 2018, wrote that "Southrop's quietness feels oddly surreal, like we've walked into a film set." The recreation ground at Jubilee Close, given to the village in 1938, still has its football goals and long jump, with the river never far from earshot.
