Weston-sub-Edge

Village Food and Useful Stops

Friday Street runs through the middle of Weston-sub-Edge, and on it stands the Seagrave Arms, a Cotswold-stone inn of about four hundred years with seven en-suite rooms upstairs. One part keeps the original beams, open fires and farmhouse furniture; the other is a smarter dining room. The kitchen leans on local and seasonal produce, and the bar pours real ales and works with Purity Brewing Company. Dogs are welcome, and there is a garden courtyard for the days that allow it.

At the front of the village hall is the Village Bar, run by Becky and her team since 2017. It is small and unfussy, family- and dog-friendly, with home-cooked Cotswold tapas, pub classics, light bites, Sunday roasts and homemade desserts. Upstairs there is a games room with pool and snooker.

What the village keeps is a book exchange and a tourist-information point.

The Green and Dover's Hill

On the Green there is a playground, opened in 2018, with a young children's play area, a half-size football pitch, picnic tables, seating and a weather shelter. The village hall has a bowling green alongside it.

The village sits at the foot of Dover's Hill, on the lower western edge of the Cotswold escarpment where it meets the Vale of Evesham. The Cotswold Way crosses the hill and reaches its northern end at Chipping Campden, about two miles off, where it meets the Monarch's Way and the Heart of England Way. The approach is uphill, through grassland and woodland, and from the top the Vale opens out; the lower ground can be steep and uneven underfoot. Closer to home, a public footpath marked on an 1840 map crosses the old moat and earthworks beside the church.

Dover's Hill itself is a natural amphitheatre. Robert Dover began his Cotswold Olimpicks there in 1612; they were revived in 1966 and still run each year.

Church and Moated Manor

St Lawrence's church is thirteenth-century, with a fifteenth-century west tower; it was heavily rebuilt in 1853–54 by F. Preedy. The stone altar inside is nearly a yard wide and eleven feet long. There is a late-seventeenth-century hexagonal pulpit, two carved medieval figures beneath fourteenth-century canopies, stained glass by Wailes dated 1854 and 1867, and an Elizabethan brass to William Hodges, who died in 1590. A medieval stone coffin lies outside the south chancel. When J. Harvey Bloom recorded the churchyard inscriptions in 1893, he found them "chiefly remarkable for their poetical character."

Beside the church is a scheduled medieval site: a moated manor with a roughly ninety-two-metre-square island and a moat up to twenty metres wide and three metres deep. Hugh Giffard probably built the residence, and the manor later passed through the Giffard family. Sir John Giffard joined the Earl of Lancaster's rebellion against Edward II and was hanged at Gloucester in 1322; the manor was forfeited, later restored to the family, and probably pulled down around 1800. Local tradition has its stone reused in the village walls.

Ancient Traces and a Coin Hoard

The place is older still. Roman coins and pottery point to occupation from the second century, and the road on the parish boundary, Ryknild Street, is now plain Buckle Street. When the Domesday surveyors reached Weston they counted thirty-one households and valued the whole manor at seven pounds, though other records put it at five; Ansfrid of Cormeilles was lord.

A later find came in 1981, during work on the old coach-house village hall. Under the centre beam was a lead container holding two gold and three hundred and seven silver coins, the latest dated 1642. They are now at the Corinium Museum in Cirencester.

Arriving and a Village Name

Trains run from Honeybourne, the nearest station, and the village lies on the B4632 between Broadway, three miles one way, and Chipping Campden, a little over two the other. Buses stop on both sides of the road by the Seagrave Arms: Johnsons service 1 between Moreton-in-Marsh and Stratford-upon-Avon, and the 606 to Cheltenham. Hidcote's garden rooms are nearby.

The old post office at the heart of it all is now a house called Popfosters, named for Jack Foster, who kept the Seagrave through the 1950s.