Ford, Long Dean and Castle Combe

The Ford and Castle Combe walk is a 4.5-mile (7.2km) circular walk from the White Hart Inn at Ford up the wooded By Brook valley by Long Dean into Castle Combe and back. It is moderate, climbing about 160m in steady pulls, takes two to two and a half hours, and has pubs at the start and halfway.

One walker in June 2026 did it in an hour and 40 minutes. It approaches Castle Combe the way few visitors do, on foot up the valley, and leaves the car park and the crowds at the top of the hill to everyone else.

Long Dean and the By Brook woods

The first half follows the By Brook north by Long Dean, a hamlet in the valley bottom, and climbs into the woods on its east side. The Cotswold Voluntary Wardens lead a guided walk that runs the other way through the same valley, by the Macmillan Way to Long Dean and Ford and back along the brook, and warn that it may have steep, narrow or muddy sections. Walkers on this loop say the views come only occasionally, because so much of it is under trees.

Castle Combe

The village is a single street running from the Market Cross down to the By Brook. The cross is a scheduled monument, a fourteenth-century pedestal under a stone-tiled roof on four piers. St Andrew's, Grade I, has a tower begun in 1434 and paid for partly under the will of Sir John Fastolf, who bought cloth here for his soldiers. In the Middle Ages there were fulling mills on the brook, and the Scrope family held the manor for nearly five hundred years, until 1866. Inside is the tomb of Sir Walter de Dunstanville, who died in 1270.

On The Hill at the top of the village the route passes Hill House, with a central plaque dated 1823, and the Dower House, Grade II*, a late seventeenth-century house with a shell hood over its door carved with the Scrope arms. Just south of the White Hart, the Old Court House is early sixteenth century, timber-framed with a jettied upper floor, and its listing records a fireplace inside with painted royal arms, probably of Henry VIII.

The parish council estimated in November 2025 that around half the visitors come from overseas. It says the village is busiest in summer, at midday and on bank holidays, when the car park is likely to fill, and quietest early in the morning, late in the afternoon, in the evening and in winter. Our piece on Cotswold film locations has the films shot here, from Doctor Dolittle to War Horse.

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What walkers report

Reviewers find the paths well maintained and the climbs short, though a few call some stretches steep. After rain it is muddy, and in summer parts are overgrown. One walker in June 2026 had to climb over a fallen tree soon after the start. Sheep graze some fields, so dogs go on leads there, and a walker with large dogs in October 2026 found every gate passable. The same walker found the stretch beside the road at Ford nerve-racking. One walker in October 2026 noticed the noise from Castle Combe Circuit, the motor-racing track on the old RAF airfield, under a mile from the village by road.

Food and drink

Walkers count pubs at the start, the middle and the end. The White Hart Inn at Ford, which says it is dog friendly, is at the start. In Castle Combe, the White Hart is a fourteenth-century Wadworth pub that opens at 9am with pastries and welcomes dogs, the Castle Inn has 12 rooms, and Bybrook at the Manor House kept its Michelin star in the 2026 guide. There is a tea room on The Street as well.

Parking and getting there

Walkers report free parking at the start in Ford. If you start in Castle Combe instead, the parish council asks visitors not to drive down into the village but to use the pay car park on Dunns Lane in Upper Castle Combe. More than 350 cars were booked for illegal parking in the village over the summer of 2025, mostly at weekends and on bank holidays. Public toilets are just south of the bridge at the bottom of the village; Wiltshire Council lists the one in Castle Combe, on The Street, as open in daytime hours, with a disabled toilet on the National Key Scheme and baby changing.

More walks nearby

The Biddestone heritage trail explores the next stretch of the By Brook, by Slaughterford, from Biddestone about 3 miles south. North of here, the river walk at Malmesbury circles a hilltop town, and our guide to the South Cotswolds has more.