Berkeley Castle has been lived in by the same family for more than 800 years, which makes it the oldest continuously occupied castle in England. The keep still holds the dungeon and the cell linked to Edward II, and from May to October the Walled Garden houses a tropical Butterfly House with 25-plus species. It is not the kind of thing most small towns have at the end of the road.
The town sits on a hill in the Vale of Berkeley, midway between Bristol and Gloucester, between the Severn and the M5. Georgian and medieval buildings line the streets, and 17th-century houses front the High Street.
The Malt House on Marybrook Street is a family-run hotel, bar and restaurant. The menu runs classic and modern British, with a Speciality Sausage Board. Dishes have included black pudding glazed with Stilton, pork steak with forestière sauce, halibut with lime and butter, and a roasted vegetable lasagne.
The Berkeley Arms is a 16th-century coaching inn in the centre of town. On a 1543 map it is marked as the "Kings Inn," a promotion it seems to have quietly declined to keep.
The Mariners Arms on Salter Street is the oldest building in Berkeley, dating to at least 1476. Its name comes from the days when boats could navigate up Berkeley Pill and the mariners would walk up the road to the alehouse. It recently closed, becoming a convenience store. For meat there is Adey's Organic Meats, raised in Berkeley and sold at the Stroud, Cheltenham and Thornbury farmers' markets.
The Church of St Mary the Virgin has parts dating to 1225, a 12th-century font from an earlier church, and a detached tower built in 1753 that holds ten bells. Out in the churchyard is the grave of Dicky Pearce, said to be England's last court jester, who died in 1728 falling from the Minstrels' Gallery. His epitaph was written by Jonathan Swift and begins, "HERE LIES THE EARL OF SUFFOLK'S FOOL / MEN CALLED HIM DICKY PEARCE."
Edward Jenner was born here and came back as the local doctor. On 14 May 1796 he inoculated James Phipps, his gardener's eight-year-old son, with cowpox taken from a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, who had caught it from a cow called Blossom. It was the world's first vaccination, done in a garden hut he called the Temple of Vaccinia, now open with his house as Dr Jenner's House, Museum & Garden.
For walking, the Severn Way runs along the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal from the car park at Purton, an easy two miles past the Purton Hulks — the largest ship graveyard in mainland Britain, over 80 vessels run aground after a 1909 riverbank collapse to protect the bank from the tide. Five miles northeast is Slimbridge, 325 hectares of wetland with 200-plus bird species.
The nearest station is Cam and Dursley, five miles off; Berkeley's own closed in 1964. The Stagecoach 62 runs Dursley to Bristol through the town several times a day, with the M5 at junctions 13 and 14.
When the Domesday surveyors came in 1086 they counted 262 villagers, ten mills, and valued the whole place at £170 to the lord — a considerable sum, for a town that now measures its fame in one doctor, one jester, and a cow.