Temple Guiting

Country Inns in the Upper Windrush Valley

The Plough Inn at Ford stands across the road from Jackdaw's Castle, a racehorse-training estate, and the connection runs deep. The pub was Racing Pub of the Year in 2008 and took Channel 4's version of the title in 2013. It serves seasonal food and pub classics, pours Donnington Ale, and has held its Cask Marque accreditation since 2022. The garden has a children's play area, and dogs are welcome inside and out.

Ford is part of Temple Guiting, a small village strung along the Upper Windrush valley at the north-western edge of the Cotswolds. The Windrush here is young, barely more than a stream, fed by springs and ponds and shaded by mature beech. The stone underfoot is honey-coloured Guiting limestone, named after the village; five quarries still work in the wider parish.

At Kineton, the Halfway House takes its name from its position halfway between Temple Guiting and Guiting Power. It is a 17th-century inn of mellow stone, with an open fire, exposed timber and three bedrooms if you want to stay put. Chefs Nathan Eades and Liam Goff run the kitchen, which turns out pies, fish and chips, locally reared steaks from the grill, Sunday roast, and steamed puddings and crumbles brought up to date. Donnington BB, Cotswold Gold and SBA are the regular cask beers. Corpus Christi College, Oxford owned the place until 1975.

Bemborough Farm: Provisions and Rare Breeds

For provisions and a longer day out, the Ox Shed shop sits within the parish at Bemborough Farm, part of Cotswold Farm Park. It sells food and drink alongside clothing, homewares, garden bits, toys and gifts, and the adjoining restaurant cooks with local ingredients.

The Farm Park is Adam Henson's, and it is a major family draw. More than fifty rare and native breeds live across the barns and paddocks, with indoor soft play, outdoor play, tractor rides and a gentle conservation walk. Among the residents are Strawberry the cow and Ellen, an Iron Age sow.

Parish Paths and the Templar Church

Walkers have the run of the parish: 39 public footpaths and bridleways, including a stretch of the Cotswold Way at Farmcote and parts of the Winchcombe Way and Wardens' Way. The longer circuit from Stanway takes in Temple Guiting, Ford and Cutsdean over ten miles, with stepping stones, woodland and the grassed-over site of Pinnock, a village deserted centuries ago.

St Mary's church is one of the village's oldest surviving landmarks, and the most telling. The Knights Templar are said to have founded it around 1170, and both the church and the village name keep the memory: one of the eleven weathered corbels around the outside carries a Templar cross. The chancel and nave are 12th-century Norman, the north transept 13th-century, the tower a 17th-century rebuild. Inside are a 15th-century octagonal font, an early-18th-century pulpit, George II's plaster arms from 1742, and a painted Decalogue of about 1746 that spent more than a hundred years hidden before being restored. Three medieval stained-glass panels survive. Nine others were sold by the Talbot family to a London dealer in 1809 for five pounds, and now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Manor History and Getting Here

The Templars left more than a church. Manor Farmhouse, early 16th-century and E-shaped, was probably tied to the order, and the wider manor gardens, laid out by Jinny Blom, are tended for guests who stay rather than for the passing public. Fulling, the finishing of woollen cloth, was once common work in the valley; a medieval glass panel in the church shows St James the Less holding a fuller's club. Domesday recorded three mills in the parish in 1086. The surveyors that year valued the whole place at eleven pounds, down a pound on twenty years before.

The nearest railway station is Moreton-in-Marsh, about seven and a half miles off. The B4077 near Ford runs towards Winchcombe one way and Toddington and its steam railway the other. The North Cotswolds Robin bus has to be booked ahead rather than caught.

Village Energy and the Poor Lotts

In 2017 the village turned up on television, in a programme following its efforts to generate its own renewable energy. It was presented by Robert Llewellyn, a writer and actor who lives here.

A parcel of the old village allotments, called the Poor Lotts, belonged to a parish charity, and the rent from it went to a few of Temple Guiting's pensioners and students.