Beside the green in Warmington there is an L-shaped stone trough, a sheep-wash fed by a spring-fed pond the village still calls The Pool. It went out of use around 1934 and was partly filled with clay and concrete in 1956 before being dug out again and restored. The Pool is now listed; the sheep-wash beside it is not. Both sit at the centre of a compact village built around a large green, with farmland running out in every direction.
The buildings are ironstone, which gives Warmington the warm colour of the Banburyshire fringe of the Cotswolds. The village stands on the northern side of the Edge Hill ridge, near the Cotswolds' north-eastern tip, and once you have walked the green and the pond you have more or less seen the shape of the place.
There are two pubs. The Falcon, on Warwick Road where the B4100 runs past, is the food-led one: a central fireplace, a garden room, smaller side rooms off it and two planted terraces looking out over the countryside. The daily menu has run to smoked ChalkStream trout with horseradish-and-dill crème fraîche, a mushroom, celeriac and ale pie, braised shoulder of lamb with minted new potatoes, a Malaysian fish curry with king prawns, hake, salmon and mussels, and a lemon-and-lime posset. Dogs are welcome in the bar and at specifically bookable tables, and the general manager, Adam, signs the welcome.
The Plough is the smaller one, a red ironstone local dating from the Civil War era, with low beams, low ceilings and a copper-hooded stove. There is a small front bar, a dining room and a much larger garden behind. It serves cask ale and draws walkers, cyclists and locals. Its name is a piece of village bookkeeping: when Thomas Wilkins, who held the licence by 1807, moved the Hare and Hounds sign to his pub on the turnpike road, the inn he left behind became the Plough.
For anything beyond the two pubs you go just outside the village to the National Herb Centre on the B4100, which is a garden centre, a herb centre and a Café Bistro with gardens and nature trails. Peter Turner founded it in 1997, and it welcomes dogs on leads in the grounds and outside seating, though only assistance dogs can come into the shop and café.
The walking is why many people come. The route to Edge Hill starts at the green and runs 6.3 miles through Arlescote before climbing the escarpment, following the Battlefields Trail and the Macmillan Way. The ridge rises to 700 feet and forms the north-eastern outcrop of the Cotswolds, looking down over the 1642 battlefield and, on a clear day, as far as the Malvern Hills. A gentler 2.3-mile loop from Upton House takes in the same views over fields and stiles.
The Church of St Michael is worth the few minutes it takes to find it. It is Grade I listed and built of coursed ironstone, with a nave going back to the twelfth century and additions running into the fifteenth. Inside there is a fine Decorated south doorway, a restored set of triple sedilia, the lower section of a fifteenth-century oak screen and a two-storey vestry and priest's room reached by a stone winding stair. Pevsner called Warmington "a show village of Warwickshire."
The history is deep and mostly quiet. Domesday recorded 56 households and 69 acres of meadow, and valued the main holding at ten pounds. A small priory once stood near where Court Close is now and has completely vanished. The first major engagement of the English Civil War was fought at Edgehill on 23 October 1642, and a Royalist captain killed that day lies in the churchyard.
Getting here is straightforward: Banbury station is about five miles south, the B4100 passes just outside the village, the M40 is a short drive away at junction 12, and the bus, service 496, comes through on Thursdays. Upton House has a 1930s country-house interior, terraced gardens and a substantial art collection.
In a garden behind the cottages on Church Hill are the beeboles, alcoves cut to hold woven-straw bee skeps. They are rare survivors. You would walk past them without knowing.
