Toddington

Steam and Supper

The locomotive sheds at Toddington station are where the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway keeps and repairs its engines, and guided tours run through them on some Tuesdays and Sundays; check dates before you go. This is the working heart of the line. Volunteers began restoring the site in 1981, and it now runs steam trains north to Broadway and south to Cheltenham Race Course, calling at Winchcombe, Hayles Abbey Halt and Gotherington along the way. The original Great Western station opened here in 1904 to carry the district's fruit, closed in 1960, and came back as heritage.

Next to the platform is the Pheasant Inn. Richard and Carys have held the tenancy since 2016; he cooks, she runs the front. The food is homemade, and Donnington Ales are on the bar. The menu runs to roasted lamb shank with minted gravy, crispy Gloucester Old Spot belly pork with apple-and-cider gravy, a steak and Donnington Ale pie, and a fish pie of smoked haddock, salmon, cod and prawn. Start with the creamy garlic chestnut mushrooms on ciabatta. There is a beer garden out back, and one Google reviewer called the place "very dog friendly."

Station Treats and Hailes Produce

The station itself has the Cotswold Halt Café, which does fresh-filled sandwiches, homemade cakes, teacakes and ice cream, along with the railway's own Rail Ale; the adjoining shop sells books, gifts and railway memorabilia. There is a large free car park, an accessible toilet and baby-changing. For children there is a play area, a hands-on miniature signal box you can work by hand, a viewing area over the locomotive yard, and on selected summer Sundays a two-foot-gauge railway running alongside. Dogs are welcome on leads.

A little way off at Hailes, Hayles Fruit Farm has a farm shop selling homegrown and local fruit and vegetables and its own award-winning apple juice and cider, grown, pressed, pasteurised and bottled on site. Cider-making here is said to go back to Lord Sudeley's time. There is pick-your-own, coarse fishing, a nature trail and a tearoom.

River Paths and Gothic Craft

The Isbourne Way passes through the village: fourteen miles following the River Isbourne from its source on Cleeve Hill down to the Avon at Evesham, waymarked with a green disc and a mill wheel. The same river runs through Toddington Park, where it was dammed into a narrow, tree-lined lake about a kilometre long. One practical caution: Stanway House is only a mile from the station, but the B4077 has no footway, so drive or cycle rather than walk it.

The Church of St Andrew was built between 1873 and 1879 by G. E. Street for Lord Sudeley, in an Early Decorated Gothic that spared nothing: a hammer-beam nave roof, Purbeck-marble shafts, a Hardman east window, later Clayton and Bell glass, a font of Derbyshire spar. Inside is Lough's altar tomb, with effigies of Charles Hanbury-Tracy, first Baron Sudeley, and his wife.

The Tracy Manor and Domesday

That name runs through the place. In 1165 Ralph de Sudeley gave Toddington to his brother William, who took the Tracy name, and five years later William de Tracy became one of the four knights who murdered Thomas Becket at Canterbury. His family held the manor here for the better part of a millennium. When fire and dry rot damaged the old Jacobean house, Charles Hanbury-Tracy designed the Gothic mansion that stands today, between 1820 and 1835; it is thought to have influenced the design of the Houses of Parliament. The manor has since been the National Union of Teachers' headquarters, US Army accommodation during the war, the Christian Brothers' headquarters and noviciate, and an Arab school, and it burned again in 1965. Damien Hirst bought it in 2005. It is privately owned, with no public access.

The Domesday surveyors counted thirty-six households here in 1086, along with two mills and a salthouse, and valued the whole manor at forty pounds—the same as it had been valued in 1066.

Two Halves and the Railway Yard

The village has two halves: the old core along Church Lane and New Town at the crossroads where the B4077 meets the B4632, about five kilometres north of Winchcombe. Winchcombe has Sudeley Castle and Katherine Parr's tomb; Hailes Abbey, a stop down the line, drew medieval pilgrims after it acquired what was said to be a phial of Christ's blood. But most days at Toddington, the loudest things are the locomotives in the yard and a full beer garden next door.