Broadway, Pye Corner and the Cotswold Way

The Broadway, Pye Corner and the Cotswold Way walk is a 3.7-mile (6km) circular route from Church Close car park in Broadway, through the quieter fields south of the village. It is moderate, with 114m of climbing and a steep descent, and takes about an hour and three quarters. The Lygon Arms is at the start and finish.

It comes home down the last mile and a half of the Cotswold Way before the trail reaches Broadway from the south. Allow longer if you stop in the village.

The High Street and Tudor House

The walk starts with Broadway at its best known: a few hundred metres of the High Street. The Lygon Arms is an early seventeenth-century inn, listed Grade II*, with a frieze dated 1620. Further along, Tudor House was built in 1659 and 1660 as a house and farm building. Its listing picks out the two-storey bay window, whose parapet carries three carved shields, the outer two dated 1659 and 1660. It is listed Grade II*.

Tudor House holds the Broadway Museum and Art Gallery, open from 10am to 4.30pm (last entry 4pm) and closed on Sundays. Its winter days are Monday to Thursday and Saturday, as it also closes on Fridays. Its 2026 show of finds from the 2016 flood works on Badsey Brook, which ties in with the end of this walk past the brook's flood storage area, ran until 23 October; finds from the Milestone Ground dig are on show in its place until 26 February 2027. The Gordon Russell Design Museum, in one of Russell's old workshops on Russell Square, is a short step off the High Street.

Pye Corner and the climb

The first half is a mile of level fields to Pye Corner, then the walk's one real climb. South of the Activity Park the path runs across the fields to Lybrook Farm, where you meet the Snowshill road for a short stretch. The house at the corner of West End Lane is Pye Corner: seventeenth century and late eighteenth, restored around 1900, of limestone rubble with a stone slate roof, and listed Grade II.

From West End Lane the climb begins. The path rises by about 90m in just under a mile (1.4km), past the edge of Lydbrook Coppice, to the top of the slope, where you join the Cotswold Way on a restricted byway near Manor Farm. This is the highest part of the walk, at about 180m.

Down the Cotswold Way

The way home is the steepest part of the walk, down the Cotswold Way into Broadway. It is the first stretch of the National Trail's section from Broadway to Wood Stanway, walked in reverse, and our page on the Cotswold Way from Broadway to Wood Stanway carries on south from here. The descent runs through fields and past small patches of woodland, before the path levels out beside the Badsey Brook flood storage area.

You come out on Church Street by St Michael's, which was built in 1839 by H. Eginton and restored in 1890, with a First World War screen in the chancel. Also on Church Street, Austin House is a symmetrical house of about 1700 in limestone ashlar, with three gabled dormers, listed Grade II.

What walkers report

Walkers who have reviewed this loop on AllTrails agree on mud. From November to March they report wet, slippery fields and descents, and several say boots were not enough and wellies would have been better. In summer they found the ground dry and the path easy to follow, and in spring and summer wildflowers in the fields.

They report sheep and horses in several fields, cattle in a few, and electric fencing beside horses, so dogs need a short lead there. There are stiles, and walkers found dog gates beside some of them. Some prefer to go round anticlockwise, the reverse of the directions here, so that they climb the woodland stretch above Broadway rather than slide down it. Once out of the village, walkers report meeting few people, which makes this a quieter choice than the walk to Broadway Tower.

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Parking, buses and food

Park in Church Close car park, behind the High Street, and come early on fine days. It is Wychavon's short-stay car park, charged from 8am to 6pm every day (£3 for four hours in 2026), with accessible toilets, and walkers report that it fills early. The 606 bus from Cheltenham and Winchcombe stops at the Lygon Arms about every two hours, Monday to Saturday.

There is nowhere to eat on the loop itself, but the High Street is on the way out and back. Russell's of Broadway and the Broadway Hotel are within a couple of hundred metres of the route, and the Lygon Arms, which welcomes dogs, has its Grill. For more rooms, see places to stay in Broadway.

Longer walks from Broadway

Two more loops start in or above the village. For the hill east of Broadway, Broadway and Broadway Tower is the National Landscape's 4-mile loop up to the tower and back down the Cotswold Way. Snowshill and Snowswood is a short, steep loop from the hill village above Broadway, and our Snowshill guide has more on it.