Yanworth's village sign was commissioned by Lord Vestey to carry the Stowell Park estate and its family crest. That is a fair introduction to the place. This is an estate hamlet in the Coln Valley, a handful of stone houses on lanes that fall toward the river and its mills on one side and climb toward high farmland on the other.
There is no pub within the village itself, so a stay here runs on a car and a plan. The nearest table is the Inn at Fossebridge, a short drive down the valley, which keeps two traditional bars in the oldest part of the building: flagstone floors, beams, mellow stone walls, an open fire and a log burner. Walkers, children and dogs are all welcome, and the riverside gardens and terrace have outdoor tables. The menu runs from a layered prawn cocktail and a honey-baked Capricorn goat's-cheese salad to a Fossebridge beef burger, a family-recipe cottage pie, sea bream in a white-wine-and-parsley sauce and a shin-of-beef hot-water-crust pie, with apple-and-blackberry crumble after. Local cask ales are served.
Chedworth's Seven Tuns, the other pub within reach, is a 17th-century limestone inn currently closed for refurbishment.
What Yanworth has instead of a high street is walking, and a lot of it. Two circular routes pass through Yanworth. One is a six-mile, three-hour loop from Hangman's Stone that picks up the Macmillan Way into the village and the Monarch's Way along the Coln between Stowell and Yanworth Mills before turning back past Fossebridge and the edge of Stowell Park. The other, from Oxpens, runs about seven miles through bluebell woods in late spring, high farmland, Coln-side field edges and a stone sheep-wash, with the option of walking on to Hangman's Stone itself, a holed standing stone that has attracted several grim explanations for its name and confirmed none of them. The Cotswold Voluntary Wardens call the Stowell Park circuit "a glorious circuit of classic Cotswold countryside."
The church of St Michael sits among all this, and it is older than almost everything around it. The core is 12th-century, with a chancel arch of about 1200 and a cable-moulded Norman font; later work added the 15th century, and then the Victorians their roofs, pews and east window. Inside there are grotesque corbel heads, a carved woman's face, a scratch sundial cut into the stone and, from after the Reformation, a wall painting of Father Time as a skeleton carrying a scythe. Local tradition holds that marks in the outer wall were left by Cromwell's cannon balls, though nobody has proved it.
The reason most people find Yanworth at all is Chedworth Roman Villa, whose postal address is the village even though it sits over in the next parish. It is walkable from here, down in a wooded fold of the valley. A gamekeeper is said to have turned it up by chance in 1864; the archaeologist James Farrer and a gang of estate workers then cleared the woodland and exposed one of the largest Roman villas in Britain, and Welbore St Clair Baddeley raised a public subscription to buy it for the National Trust in 1924. There are in-situ mosaics, hypocausts, bath-house rooms, a museum and a shrine over a natural spring, along with a café and a shop selling Roman puzzles and games. Children get seasonal trails and archaeological activities; the surfaces are uneven, and only assistance dogs are admitted.
Long before any of that, the Domesday commissioners counted twenty-three households at Yanworth, along with one mill worth three shillings and twopence, and valued the whole manor at six pounds, down from seven twenty years earlier.
Getting here means a car. The nearest station is Kemble, about ten miles south; the roads come off the A429 from Northleach or Cirencester and narrow to lanes, where the brown signs point to "Roman Villa" rather than Chedworth. A Stagecoach 78 bus does reach the village hall and the villa from Cirencester, but only on scattered days, so check before you rely on it.
The village hall is licensed for a drink and can feed eighty at a cold table or sixty hot.
