Bledington

What to see

The green is the thing. The Victoria County History describes it as a large uninclosed green with a stream through it, which is still exactly right; the poplars and the stocks went in the early twentieth century, and a maypole was put up in 1953. Ducks live on the brook. Around it are stone houses, the village shop on the lane in from the river, and the King's Head.

St Leonard's, on Church Street off the green, is listed Grade I and normally open every day. It was a chapel of Winchcombe Abbey, first recorded in 1175 among the abbey's churches, with twelfth-century work in the nave walls, an arcade on squat round piers and a Norman tub font. Later centuries enriched it: a tower built inside the nave rather than added to it, so that it cuts up through the roof, and fifteenth-century painted glass filling the eight north windows of the nave, one panel dated 1470 and possibly from the workshop of John Prudde of Westminster. Look for the wrought-iron hourglass stand that timed the sermon, the scratch sundial on the aisle's south-west corner, and the clock on the tower marked V.R. 1891.

On the road to Kingham is Bledington Mill, on the site of a mill recorded in Domesday; a miller is recorded there until 1935, and the building is now a house, with a listed bridge of two arches over the Westcote Brook just south of it. The brook is the parish and county boundary on this side.

A morning here

Arrive by train at Kingham and walk in: turn right from the station, cross the county boundary almost at once, and follow the Evenlode footpath north through the water meadows and over the old railway, coming into the village past the farm buildings and the shop to the green. That is the first half of the Cotswolds National Landscape's car-free circular, and it takes about an hour. Look into the church before lunch, eat at the King's Head from midday, and walk back by the river path in the afternoon. The whole loop is about 3.5 miles (the leaflet also gives 6km).

Walks

Our walk from Kingham station to Bledington is the one to do: about 3.5 miles, two to three hours with the pub stop, on riverside and field paths with at least six stiles and a wet patch by the pond that the leaflet tells you how to skirt. The King's Head publishes three more from the green on its website: a 2.5-mile Evenlode circular, whose riverside paths it warns may be impassable in flood, 4 miles to Foxholes nature reserve by Foscot and Bould, and 6.25 miles to Nether Westcote, Church Westcote and Icomb, back along the B4450. The Oxfordshire Way, the 66-mile path fromBourton-on-the-Water towards Henley-on-Thames, also passes through the village. Across the river, the Kingham and Daylesford walk explores the Oxfordshire bank.

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Food and drink

The King's Head Inn is a sixteenth-century stone inn on the green and the only pub; it was the Good Pub Guide's national inn of the year in 2020. The bar opens from 11am to 11pm every day. Lunch runs from midday to 2pm on weekdays, to 2.30pm on Saturday and to 3pm on Sunday, and dinner from 6.30pm to 9pm, finishing at 8pm on Sunday. It has twelve rooms, six above the bar and six round a courtyard, from about £140 to £185 a night in autumn 2026, usually with a two-night minimum at weekends. Dogs are welcome in the bar but not the bedrooms, and there are EV chargers to book with the inn. In Kingham, a short taxi ride or the river walk away, are the Kingham Plough and the Wild Rabbit.

When to come

Spring and early summer are best, when the water meadows are dry enough and the green is at its best; St Leonard's says the village fête is held on the green on the second Saturday in June. The church glass needs a bright day. The Evenlode floods its meadows in winter and after heavy rain, when the riverside path from the station is mud or water, so from November to March come by road or allow for the lane. Book ahead for Sunday lunch at the King's Head.