Uley

The Old Crown and Uley Brewery

The Old Crown sits opposite the church and beside the village green. The same family has owned it for more than thirty years; Kate, Tom and their team reopened it in 2022, after a fifteen-year tenancy ended and the building was renovated. Head chef Tom Dooley's menus move from cauliflower karaage in a sweet-soy marinade and salt-and-pepper squid to beer-battered cod with minted petits pois, a pork T-bone with chimichurri, and a sweet-potato, red-pepper and spinach burrito. Dogs come in on leads and are given a bowl of water and a biscuit; the bar also sells locally made Clemootle dog biscuits to take home. On the pumps you will find Wye Valley HPA and Butty Bach alongside Stroud Brewery's Tom Long and Budding, with guest ales also available. There is a pool table and a darts board, and evenings of live music, open mic and quizzes.

Uley has been brewing far longer than that. Uley Brewery has stood on the same site since 1833, drawing on its own natural spring, and has been family-run for the past forty years. Its shop and taproom, The Forge, sells Uley Bitter, Pigs Ear, Old Spot, Uley Pale, Uley Gold and Uley Taverner — the last three listed as from brewer Ken Lush — in one-litre bottles, mini-pins and larger fresh-cask boxes.

Community shelves and St Giles

For everything else there is Uley Community Stores and Post Office at 53 The Street, owned by the residents who use it. It carries daily essentials next to locally grown and locally sourced produce, and doubles as a hub for village news. Up on South Street, the Vestry Cafe occupies Bethesda Chapel as part of the Prema Arts Centre.

St Giles faces the Old Crown across the green, and it is younger than it looks. S. S. Teulon designed it in a fourteenth-century Decorated Gothic style and it was built in 1857–58, replacing a church pulled down the year before, on a site that had held a stone church since the eleventh century. Inside there is a six-bay nave with round piers under a wind-braced collar king-post roof, stained glass by Wailes, and a Norman octagonal font bowl kept from the older building. The great bell, cast by Abraham Rudhall in 1715, carries the line "The living I to church do call, and to the grave do summon all."

Hillforts, shrines and Uley Blue

The village lies in a sheltered valley behind the steep Cotswold escarpment, at the eastern edge of the Severn Vale, along the spring-fed River Ewelme. Above it rises Uley Bury, a roughly rectangular Iron Age hillfort of about twenty-three hectares and one of the largest in the Cotswolds. The four-mile Hills and Hillforts circular climbs it and Cam Long Down along the Cotswold Way, with views across the Severn Estuary to Wales; it is graded moderate to difficult for its stiles, steps and steep ground, with a shorter mile-and-a-half loop for lighter legs. A second circular links Uley to Nympsfield and Frocester Hill by way of Nympsfield Long Barrow and Hetty Pegler's Tump. In all, the parish keeps about twenty-five miles of footpaths and bridleways.

The hills here were sacred long before the fort. On West Hill, Neolithic standing stones or posts gave way to Iron Age timber shrines and then a Romano-Celtic temple, enlarged in the fourth century, with finds implying the worship of Mercury. Later the village made its money from cloth. Uley and neighbouring Owlpen prospered on broadcloth; the deep "Uley Blue" was known internationally and went into army uniforms during the Napoleonic wars, supporting high wages and a great many inns. When coal power drew the industry north, the valley mills fell quiet, and cloth-making here was finished by 1840.

Play, paths and arrival

For families there is the Jubilee Playground off Raglan Way, remade in 2022 with a multi-play structure, an in-ground trampoline and a small stream "beach"; it first opened in 1978, inaugurated by Princess Anne. Shadwell Playing Field, six acres of football and cricket pitches, was bought as a memorial to thirteen local people killed in the Second World War.

The B4066 runs through the village as The Street. Cam & Dursley station is about 2.7 miles away on Great Western Railway, and Stagecoach West's 65 and 65X buses connect Uley with Stroud, Dursley, Stonehouse and Gloucester.

Hetty Pegler's Tump

Nearby, Hetty Pegler's Tump — a Neolithic burial mound thirty-seven metres long — is named after Hester Pegler, who owned the land in the seventeenth century. It overlooks the Severn Valley.