A stream runs through the beer garden of the Mill Inn, which is the first thing you will want to sit beside on a warm afternoon. The inn sits low beside the River Coln in coursed limestone, Grade II listed, with open fires and old beams inside and a stone-slate roof above. Two firebacks in the building are dated 1588 and 1699. The rear extensions, added around 1960, reused stone from Northleach Prison, which is the kind of thing a village keeps quiet about and then puts in the leaflet.
The Mill Inn is credited as the birthplace of chicken in a basket, and it is still on the menu, crispy fried. The rest of the food is honest country cooking: Old Brewery beer-battered fish and chips, steak, shin and ale pie, pan-fried lamb's liver with onion-and-bacon gravy, crispy Korean chicken, pressed ham hock, crispy squid. You come for the fires and the water and stay because nobody is hurrying you.
Shopping is thin on the ground here, so this is a village you stock for rather than shop in. What Withington offers instead is ground to walk on. A free family trail begins at the church and threads together the village green, Dark Lane, the Mill Inn, the old railway and the playing field, crossing an ancient right of way over the Coln. The field path turns to deep mud in winter, and some stretches beside the road have no pavement, so bring boots and keep children close on the tarmac. For a longer outing, a five-mile circular from the Mill Inn takes about two and a half hours over ground graded for moderate fitness and the odd steep slope.
The playing field has a children's play area and a cricket square, and there is a small green, which between them cover most of what a family needs on a slow morning.
St Michael and All Angels is Grade I listed, with twelfth-century origins and a tower whose three stages were built in the twelfth, thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The south doorway is Norman, carved with three orders of chevron, flower enrichment and beast-head stops, and the corbel table above has been reset with grotesque animal heads. Inside there is a priest's effigy, fragments of medieval glass, and a window by Ninian Comper carrying his strawberry signature. Set into the fabric is a plague stone reading HONEST JHON STOCKWELL, dated 1665. William Cobbett called it "a church like a small cathedral" in 1830, which was not flattery so much as measurement.
Opposite the churchyard stands the Corner House, which has been a pilgrims' lodging on the road to Hailes Abbey, a pub called The George, and the village police station with its own lock-up. A five-seat privy still survives in its garden. Next door, the Forge was once a working forge. A deep-walled footpath called the Gulley was rerouted in the 1860s after the rector objected to parishioners passing too near his house on the way to worship, and the diversion is still the way you walk.
The older history is buried, literally. South of the village lies a scheduled Roman complex where Samuel Lysons dug the first villa in 1811 and sent its Orpheus mosaic to the British Museum; a second, larger complex near the Coln was found by excavation in 2006. A monastery stood here between roughly 674 and 704, founded by Æthelred, king of Mercia, and Oshere, under-king of the Hwicce. The railway came later and left in 1961, and the trail still passes its bridge remains and a length of old trackbed.
The village sits in a broad valley running north to south, the Coln on its eastern side and springs on the western slopes below Withington Hill, which reaches 289 metres. Cheltenham is about seven miles north-west, with the nearest trains at Cheltenham Spa; Cirencester is eight miles south, and its Corinium Museum makes a good companion to the buried villa. Buses are the demand-responsive Robin service, which you book rather than catch, with stops at Compton Rise and the Mill Inn. Chedworth Roman Villa, with its own mosaics, is signed from the A429.
Come back to the garden at the end of the day. The stream is still running, the fires are still lit, and the same chicken is still coming out in a basket.
