Outside Turkdean Manor there is a small green, a working roadside trough once called the Town Well, and a K6 telephone box. Around fifty people live here, spread across gently rolling high wold, and the village has no current pub or shop; the former school closed in 1950. It once had a pub, a shop and a bakery too.
So for supper you drive. Northleach, about three miles south, is the everyday stop, with independent shops selling fresh bread, cakes, meat, cheese and wine. It also has The Wheatsheaf Inn, a Cotswold country inn where Head Chef Horatio cooks a seasonal British menu that changes often. Recent dishes have run to a twice-baked Nantwich cheddar soufflé with spinach and grain-mustard sauce, wild-garlic-and-mint pesto gnocchi with green beans and peas, a Hertfordshire chicken Kiev with wild-garlic butter and Jersey Royals, pan-seared chalk-stream trout, cider-battered haddock with triple-cooked chips, and Cotswolds lamb chops with Wye Valley asparagus and salsa verde. Dogs are welcome throughout, biscuits and water provided, and the garden has a pizza oven and an outside bar.
Closer still, in Cold Aston, The Plough is advertised as forthcoming, a country pub with four rooms. It is worth a look, though check whether it has opened before you set out.
The walking is the reason to base yourself here. The Cotswolds National Landscape's Four Gems and a Diamond is an eight-mile circular from Cold Aston, linking Cold Aston, Notgrove, Turkdean and Hazleton across open country in four to four and a half hours, with a few steep sections. The Ramblers' Big Views, Small Villages loop from Northleach threads through Hampnett, Turkdean, Cold Aston and Farmington. Both trade on the same thing: long views over open country. The approach from the north drops through the Beeches, a beech avenue, to a bridge over the small Turkadina stream at the foot of the hill; the parish climbs to around 740 feet at its northern end.
All Saints sits at the centre of it, Norman at its core and Grade I listed: a twelfth-century nave and chancel, a thirteenth-century south aisle, a fifteenth-century tower. Outside, a corbel table carries carved animal heads, and a blocked priest's door keeps its diapered tympanum with a mass dial scratched beside it. Inside are traces of wall painting, including royal arms and a full-length figure set against stars, and a white-painted oak screen made in 1949 by Peter Falconer and decorated with flowers and butterflies. A south-aisle window by Henry A. Payne remembers Dame Julia Bolton, who died in 1924. The church and its seven sister churches in the benefice are open to visitors every day, closing at dusk in winter.
Under the fields to one side lies a Roman complex of real size, roughly 120 by 75 metres arranged around three courtyards, occupied from the late second century into the late fourth. None of it is visible. Parch marks were sketched in 1976, an aerial photograph in 1995 showed how much was buried there, and Time Team dug it in 1997 and returned in 1998; finds have included coins, tesserae, hypocaust box tiles, glass and an enamelled bronze brooch inscribed VTERE FELIX, good luck to the wearer. A large central bath has led some to wonder whether it was a sanctuary rather than a villa. To see excavated Roman mosaics and bath-houses for yourself, drive to Chedworth Roman Villa.
The Domesday surveyors recorded two Turkdeans. Upper Turkdean, with twenty households, was worth five pounds a year to its lord; Lower Turkdean, with five households, ten shillings.
For a while the village had an unlikely recording studio. Steve Winwood built one at his manor here and named it Netherturkdonic, and made much of Arc of a Diver in it, largely alone. The songwriter Will Jennings remembered hearing Winwood play to about ten people in the church before the two of them began working together.
Trains are a fair way off; Kingham, on Great Western, appears to be the nearest, at roughly ten miles — worth checking the route before you travel. A very limited Pulhams bus, the 832, runs from Cold Aston to Andoversford, and the county's bookable Robin minibus will stop at the church and the manor if you arrange it. By car, the approach is down minor lanes.
Writing his history of the village in 1981, John Clarke listed what Turkdean had long been noted for: healthy air, sound sleep and sweet mutton.
