Eastleach and the River Leach

The Eastleach and River Leach walk is a 4.4-mile (7.1km) circular walk from Eastleach Turville, north of Lechlade-on-Thames, over Keble's Bridge and up the quiet Leach valley to the Roman Akeman Street. It climbs only about 70m but is muddy for much of the year, takes an hour and a half to two hours, and ends at the Victoria Inn.

Eastleach is a pair of villages facing each other across the little River Leach. Walkers describe the loop as quiet and popular with dog walkers, with red kites and other birds of prey overhead. Most of it is through fields and along the valley, with some lane walking at each end.

Two villages and two churches

Eastleach Turville and Eastleach Martin face each other across the Leach, each with its own church, both listed Grade I. St Michael and St Martin, beside the path on the east bank, is twelfth century, with a plain round-arched south doorway, a thirteenth-century chancel and a north transept whose five-light window of the fourteenth century the listing singles out. The tower has a low hipped roof, and the thirteenth-century porch has a sundial on its gable.

St Andrew's, near the start on the Turville side, has a fine twelfth-century doorway, two orders of chevrons round a tympanum carved with Christ in Majesty between two angels, and a fourteenth-century saddleback tower. Inside are eighteenth-century ledger slabs to the Saunders, Keble and Porter families, a Jacobean pulpit and a lectern said to have come from Tewkesbury Abbey; a reading desk is dated 1632. Its porch, like its neighbour's, carries a square sundial.

The two halves are linked by Keble's Bridge, a clapper bridge of limestone slabs on rubble piers with medieval origins, the old footbridge between the villages, named after the Keble family, important here since the sixteenth century. A two-arched road bridge of the early nineteenth century crosses the river near St Michael and St Martin.

Up the Leach to Akeman Street

North of the village the path follows the Leach upstream through the fields, past Sheephouse Plantation, and climbs to Akeman Street at the head of the loop, the Roman road that ran from Watling Street near St Albans to meet the Fosse Way at Cirencester; our story on the Roman Cotswolds follows it. The way back runs down the other side of the valley past Sheepbridge Copse. One walker found the stream dried up in the heat of July 2025, with little shade for dogs.

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What walkers report

Mud is usual from late autumn to spring, and wellies are the advice; walkers on AllTrails reported wet, muddy paths in March 2025 and February 2026. On the way back there is a stretch near the river that walkers found flooded in the winter of 2024 to 2025, where they climbed up the bank to the right, which is slippery. Walkers reported cows in the fields through 2025, one of them cornered by cattle in April, and sheep at other times. Walkers say dogs need to be on leads for much of the loop, with signs asking for leads to protect wildlife, and one noted large numbers of pheasants. There is some road walking at the start and finish.

The Victoria Inn and parking

The Victoria Inn in Eastleach Turville, an early eighteenth-century house with a coach house, has been an inn since 1856, and walkers finish there for a pint and food. When we checked its website it was closed on Tuesdays, with food from noon to 9pm Wednesday to Saturday and noon to 4pm on Sundays and Mondays. Arkell’s, the brewery, lists the pub as dog friendly in the bar and restaurant. There is no car park; walkers park on the roadside in the village, where they found plenty of room.

Nearby

Lechlade, where the Leach joins the Thames, is a few miles south. There, Lechlade and St John's Lock is a flat river loop from the Market Place past the Trout Inn by the lock, and Lechlade, Buscot and the Thames follows the river the other way. About 3 miles west, the loop from Coln St Aldwyns to Bibury is a longer valley walk of the same kind, and Cotswold Wildlife Park is a few miles north-east, towards Burford. Eastleach is in our Cirencester and the Coln Valley guide, with Fairford and Bibury, and our guide to the Cotswolds with a dog has more walks for dogs.