Old Sodbury, the hill fort and the church

The Old Sodbury hill fort and church walk is a 2.5-mile (4km) circular walk from the Dog Inn at Old Sodbury. It has no stiles and moderate slopes, and takes one and a half to two hours. It climbs the Cotswold Way to a Norman church, crosses the double ramparts of Sodbury Camp and returns past medieval fish ponds.

It is number 11 in the Cotswolds National Landscape's Cotswold Way Circular Walks, in a leaflet printed in October 2025, which calls it a taster of the southern Cotswolds; our guide to walking and the outdoors in the Cotswolds has the rest of the series.

The Dog Inn and the climb to the church

The walk starts opposite the Dog Inn on the main road through the village. The inn is listed Grade II and dates from the middle of the seventeenth century: a rendered building under a double Roman tiled roof, with a heavily moulded stone doorway under a four-centred arch, and four large moulded beams inside.

From the road the Cotswold Way slips between the houses and through a farmyard, crosses a field to a metal gate and climbs to the church. There is a bench at the top, placed for the view over the village and the country beyond. The path you have just climbed had another use: the leaflet records it as a coffin trail, from the days when Little Sodbury had no church of its own.

St John the Baptist's Church

The leaflet dates the church to the eleventh century, and its listing gives it Norman origins in the twelfth. The tower is fifteenth century, in three stages, with a castellated parapet and pinnacles. The rest was remodelled and heavily restored in 1858, probably by T. H. Wyatt, but the Norman south doorway survives, restored, and so do the round piers of the nave with their waterleaf capitals. The church is listed Grade II*.

The north transept has two ogee-headed tomb recesses. One holds a carved wooden effigy of a knight of the fourteenth century, the other a stone effigy of a soldier in high relief from about 1240. In the south transept are two Baroque tablets to Daniel Burcombe, of 1702 and 1712, and under the tower a collection of carved tablets, among them one of 1676 to William Sheen. The churchyard has many table tombs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

You leave by the lychgate, a war memorial of about 1920 in oak on a stone plinth, with a tiled roof and a bench on each side. It records 16 men of the parish who died in the Great War and four from the Second World War, and it was listed in 2015.

Sodbury Camp

Beyond the church the path climbs past the village school, along a fenced path and the foot of a grassy slope, and past a large sycamore to follow a field edge to the wood. A shaded path climbs through the trees, and a gate at the top opens onto the hill fort.

Sodbury Camp has a double rampart and is a scheduled monument. The leaflet calls it Bronze to Iron Age and says it protected ancient tribes and Saxon armies, and sheltered Edward IV before the decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses in 1471. The path crosses both ramparts on the way in and again on the far side, where it turns down through the trees.

Little Sodbury lane and the fish ponds

A shaded path drops through the wood and an orchard to the lane below Little Sodbury, where you walk 300m along the road before leaving the Cotswold Way through a gate on the left. Little Sodbury gave verses to the Gloucestershire wassail carol that Vaughan Williams arranged, as our story on wassailing in the Cotswolds tells. The return crosses Portway Lane and a run of fields, with two small footbridges, then follows the bottom of the last field beside the remains of medieval fish ponds, with the church above you on the hill to the left. A kissing gate brings you back to the outward path, two miles after you left it.

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Parking, buses, food and dogs

Park free along Chapel Lane, and park considerately; the Dog Inn's car park is for its customers. The start is at grid reference ST 753 815 on OS Explorer 167, postcode BS37 6LZ. The Stagecoach 620 stops by the Dog Inn about five times each way, linking Old Sodbury with Bath and Tetbury, Monday to Saturday, and the Coachstyle 41 runs between Yate and Malmesbury about four times a day, Monday to Saturday. For other trips by bus, see our guide to the Cotswolds without a car.

The Dog Inn, at the start and finish, is the one place to eat that the leaflet names. Its own website, checked again in November 2026, gives opening from 11am to 11pm Monday to Saturday and noon to 10pm on Sunday, with food from noon to 2.30pm and 6pm to 9pm Monday to Friday, noon to 9pm on Saturday and noon to 8pm on Sunday, calls it a family and dog friendly pub, and lists four en-suite rooms. As well as the Dog Inn, the Bell at Old Sodbury, about a kilometre from the route on Badminton Road, is a pub with four en-suite bed and breakfast rooms; it serves no food on Mondays.

The leaflet gives no dog rules and mentions no livestock. With no stiles and only gates, a dog can manage the whole walk; keep it on a lead on the 300m of road and through the farmyard at the start, and see our guide to the Cotswolds with a dog for fields with stock.

Paths, gates and the road

There are no stiles. Underfoot are a farmyard, field paths, a shaded woodland path, the grass of the ramparts and an orchard, with a metal gate, the churchyard gate and lychgate, field gates, a gated footbridge and a kissing gate on the way. The one stretch of road is the 300m beyond the orchard, where the leaflet asks you to keep an ear out for traffic, and the return crosses a small road.

The leaflet grades the walk easy, with moderate slopes. The climbs are the field up to the church and the woodland path up to the camp.

Old Sodbury and longer walks

Old Sodbury is the older of the two Sodburys. Chipping Sodbury, about 2 miles west, was founded as a market town beside it in the early thirteenth century, its church was for centuries a chapel of ease to Old Sodbury's, and the two became one parish again in 1945. On its Broad Street, the Squire is a pub open every day from midday.

The Cotswold Way runs on from Old Sodbury to Tormarton, by Dyrham Park to Cold Ashton and into Bath. Walk 10 in the same series of circular walks starts in Wotton-under-Edge, a 5-mile loop with stiles and steep sections along the wooded scarp.