Leckhampton Hill and Charlton Kings Common

Leckhampton Hill rises above the south of Cheltenham on the Cotswold Edge, and with Charlton Kings Common beside it makes a reserve of 60 hectares (Cheltenham Borough Council's figure) of open common land: limestone grassland, scrub, woodland and the cliffs of old quarries, with an Iron Age hillfort on top and the Devil's Chimney below the edge. Owned by Cheltenham Borough Council, it was launched as a National Nature Reserve in June 2026.

History

Leckhampton Hill's story runs from an Iron Age fort through 150 years of quarrying to one of the best-known fights for public access in England.

The fort and the sheep run

The summit carries Leckhampton Camp, an Iron Age hillfort with a single rampart, and beside it a round barrow inside a square enclosure, both scheduled monuments. Chance finds show the hilltop used again in Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval times, and through the Middle Ages the hill was a sheep run, grazed into the grassland that survives on it.

The quarries

Stone may have been dug here for much longer, but the recorded quarrying ran for about 150 years, from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1920s, along the scarp edge and at Brownstones on the top. Most of the stone was low grade, for roads, gravel and lime, though some was good enough to be carved inside Cheltenham College Chapel. Around 1875 the quarries produced about 8,000 tons a year, and about 50 men worked on the hill around 1915. Tramways and inclines carried the stone down. In the early 1920s a government loan meant to ease unemployment after the First World War paid for four big limekilns part way up the hill, able to burn 300 tons a day; the venture failed and had closed by 1927.

The riots of 1902 and the Stalwarts

In 1894 the quarry owner Henry Dale bought the hill and wrote to the rural district council refusing to admit any public right of access. In 1897 he built Tramway Cottage for his foreman at the foot of the middle incline, all but blocking the main footpath to the hill, and in 1899 he fenced off 26 acres of the northern slopes. On 8 March 1902 a crowd began pulling the fences down and finished on Good Friday. In July four men were arrested after a further protest; when they were acquitted, on the evening of 15 July about two thousand people turned the occupants out of Tramway Cottage and knocked it down. A London court upheld three public footpaths in 1904, but Dale rebuilt the cottage. On Good Friday 1906 another crowd of about two thousand attacked the cottage, the Riot Act was read, and eight men were jailed: the Leckhampton Stalwarts, one of whom has a memorial on the hill.

A hill for the town

Cheltenham Town Council bought about 400 acres, the hill and farmland from Salterley to the edge of Charlton Kings Common, in 1927, and the mayor opened it to the public in September 1929 from the foot of the limekilns. Charlton Kings Common followed in 1965. Plans to plant parts of the hill with trees in 1971 and the late 1990s met strong local opposition, and out of the public meetings came the Friends of Leckhampton Hill and Charlton Kings Common in 2000, who now help the council run it. In June 2026 Natural England declared the hill and common the 15th of the King's Series of National Nature Reserves, under the name Cheltenham Escarpment, with the chair of Natural England, Tony Juniper, welcoming the stronger protection for its geology and habitats.

What to see

Leckhampton Hill shows the rock of the Cotswolds better than almost anywhere: its quarry faces expose about 70m of Jurassic limestone, laid down in a shallow sea some 170 to 175 million years ago and full of shelly fossils. The Cotswolds National Landscape says the thickest sections of Jurassic rock anywhere in the country are exposed here and on Cleeve Common.

• The Devil's Chimney, the rock pillar below the scarp edge, probably left standing when an incline was cut and perhaps shaped by the quarrymen.
• The ramparts of Leckhampton Camp and the trig point on its eastern bank, with the view over Cheltenham and the Severn Vale to the hills of Wales.
• Some stonework of the 1920s limekilns and their ruined power house, with an information board nearby, and the old tramways and inclines, many of them now the paths up the hill.
• The named quarries: Salterley, Dead Man's and Brownstones.
• Common rock-rose, wild thyme, autumn gentian and purple milk-vetch, and orchids, among them musk and fly orchids.
• Some 33 kinds of butterfly, among them the small blue, marbled white, dark green fritillary, chalkhill blue and Duke of Burgundy, and glow-worms after dark in most summers.

Visiting

Leckhampton Hill and Charlton Kings Common are registered common land, free and open at all times, and you can roam anywhere on foot. A herd of Belted Galloway cattle, kept in place by GPS collars instead of fences, grazes the main grassland in autumn and winter and moves off it in spring and summer so the plants can flower and seed; a QR code on the notices shows where the herd is. Keep dogs on a short lead near them, let go of the lead if cattle threaten your dog, and keep dogs on a short lead everywhere from 1 March to 31 July, as on all open access land. The Friends list no toilets or café on the hill. The scarp is steep, the quarry rock is loose, and climbing on the Devil's Chimney is forbidden.

For visitors with limited mobility, a waymarked 3.6km scooter route starts from Brownstones car park on Hartley Lane on mostly level ground, and the council counts more than 3km of accessible paths on the reserve. Since a link past National Star College was finished, wheelchair users can go on from Crickley Hill, past the college, to Leckhampton Hill. Come between May and August for orchids and butterflies, or on a clear evening for the view west.

Getting there

For the climb, park at the Daisy Bank or Bridge car parks on Daisy Bank Road on the south edge of Cheltenham; for the top, use Salterley Quarry or Brownstones Quarry car parks at the east end of Hartley Lane. Walkers on AllTrails reported the Daisy Bank Road car parks free in September 2026; the Friends publish no charge. Crickley Hill is about 2.5km to the south-west, the next hill along the scarp. On foot, the Cotswold Way runs along the edge, our Leckhampton Hill and Devil's Chimney walk circles the common from Daisy Bank Road, and the Seven Springs and Leckhampton Hill walk comes over from the source of the Churn.

Nearby

Crickley Hill, with its café and its own hillfort, is about 2.5km along the scarp to the south-west, and Cleeve Common, the highest ground in the Cotswolds, is across Cheltenham to the north-east, with Cleeve Hill camp on its edge. Our page on where the Cotswolds are explains the limestone, and the accessible Cotswolds covers the scooter route. Below the hill, the Wheatsheaf on Old Bath Road is a family-run Wadworth pub with a large garden.