When the fountain at Stanway plays, a single jet of water climbs out of the parkland to just over three hundred feet, straight up, driven by nothing more than a reservoir on the hill above and the weight of the water in it. The estate calls it the world's tallest gravity fountain, fed from a hundred-thousand-gallon reservoir five hundred and eighty feet up, through a pipe a mile and a half long. The estate says there is no pump.
That garden belongs to Stanway House. Stanway sits at a crossroads where the B4077 meets the A438, roughly midway between Tewkesbury and Stow-on-the-Wold, with the Cotswold escarpment behind it and the Vale of Evesham spread out in front. East of the house the ground rises into wooded Lidcombe Hill through parkland of veteran oaks and sweet chestnuts, ridge-and-furrow earthworks, and a chestnut avenue running for well over a kilometre.
About a hundred yards from the house is the watermill, and it still works. It grinds stoneground wholemeal and sifted Cotswold flour on French burr stones, from wheat grown less than a mile away on the estate, and you can buy a bag of the wholemeal to take home. Its twenty-four-foot iron waterwheel was made around 1850 by the Tewkesbury ironmaster James Savory; the estate rates it England's eighth largest. The mill generated the village's electricity from 1913, fell idle in the 1950s, and was brought back to grinding order by Chris Wallis, Dave Empringham and others before it reopened in 2009.
For a farm shop, head to Hayles Fruit Farm, in Hailes within the parish. The family have run it since 1950, on an orchard Lord Sudeley first planted in 1880, and they press their own apple juice and Hayles cider from hand-picked fruit. There is an Orchard Kitchen café and pick-your-own in season.
The Mount Inn, on the Cotswold Way in adjoining Stanton, is a seventeenth-century Donnington Brewery house with an inglenook fireplace and a terraced beer garden that looks across the Vale of Evesham to the Malverns, and on a clear day the Black Mountains. The kitchen leans on named local suppliers: beef from Duncan Fairbairn at New Meadow Farm, cheese from Gorsehill Abbey Farm, vegetables from a Mr Ellis in the village. Dishes there have included halibut with caramelised bacon and sage butter on local asparagus.
Walking is a major draw. The Cotswold Way runs right through the estate parkland past the manor. North of the village, the section from Broadway crosses high escarpment tracks and the Iron Age Shenberrow Camp before dropping through Stanton, six and a half miles in all. South, the run from Wood Stanway to Winchcombe is 5.4 miles by way of Beckbury Camp and the ruins of Hailes Abbey.
The parish church, St Peter's, is worth the few minutes it takes. Its fabric spans the twelfth, thirteenth, fifteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and inside there is a wooden wine-glass pulpit from the sixteen-hundreds, a small octagonal font carved with quatrefoils, and a sundial dated 1797 that has lost its gnomon. The First World War memorial lettering in the chancel windows is by Eric Gill.
The house itself is an L-plan Grade I Jacobean house, its west hall range built around 1580–90, and the Tracy family and their descendants the Earls of Wemyss have lived here since 1533. The village hall was once the tithe barn, put up about 1370 for Tewkesbury Abbey and restored to use in 1927.
J. M. Barrie rented Stanway each summer from 1923 to 1933, and in 1925 he paid for the cricket pavilion. A local builder, John Oakey, raised it on staddle stones and roofed it with thatch, standing it about three feet clear of the ground. The nearest railway is at Evesham, twelve or so kilometres off; a booked seat on the county's on-demand Robin minibus will drop you at the tithe barn or at Wood Stanway.
The ground below the pavilion is still played on. The club runs a Saturday league side and friendlies through the week, and the pavilion now has running water, showers and a bar. "Partly because of the setting, it's a beautiful ground," the chairman, Nigel Colwell, has said, "and partly because of the way we play the game, we play in a fair and competitive way."
