Laverton and Buckland

What to see

St Michael's church at Buckland is listed Grade I, and it is worth the detour for its woodwork and glass. The building runs from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth and was restored in 1885 by F S Waller, but the restorers left a great deal alone. Historic England's list entry picks out a nave roof with its medieval painted decoration, medieval tiles in the south aisle, a bench with a panelled back dated 1615, pews that are partly sixteenth-century, and seventeenth-century communion rails and reading desk with spiral balusters. At the west end is a gallery on four Doric columns with its tiered seats still in place. Medieval glass survives at the top of the east windows of the chancel, the font is fifteenth-century, and in a case in the north aisle is a fifteenth-century cope. The best of the wall monuments is to James Thynne, who died in 1709.

Next to the church, the rectory is listed Grade I in its own right: a hall of about 1480 with a cross passage, altered in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and again in 1932 by the architect Detmar Blow. Buckland Manor, beyond, is a country house hotel in ten acres of gardens, which dates the manor to the thirteenth century. The land belonged to the abbey of Gloucester.

Laverton, under a mile south-west, has no church of its own and we found no pub, but its lanes are lined with stone farmhouses of the seventeenth century and a little later, several of them listed. It is a place to walk through slowly on the way to or from the hill.

An afternoon in Laverton and Buckland

Start at the Laverton turn on the B4632, where the 606 stops, and walk up through Laverton and along the lane to Buckland. It is about a mile. Give St Michael's half an hour or more, since most of what matters is inside. Then cross to Buckland Manor, which takes bookings from non-residents for lunch, Sunday lunch and afternoon tea, and finish there before the bus back. With a whole day, walk the Cotswold Way above instead.

Walks

The Cotswold Way from Broadway to Wood Stanway, 6.5 miles by the National Trail's measure, is the walk for these hamlets: from Broadway's green it makes a long climb past Laverton Hill Farm and the edge of Snowswood to Shenberrow, about 300m up, then drops steeply into Stanton. Buckland Manor is under a mile off the route. Our 6.6-mile loop from Stanton to Snowshill and back along the edge passes on the hill above Laverton, and from Broadway the shorter walk by Pye Corner, 3.7 miles, comes within a mile of Buckland.

Food and drink

Buckland Manor is the one place to eat in either hamlet: lunch from a lounge menu, Sunday lunch, afternoon tea from 12.30pm to 5.30pm Monday to Saturday and 4pm to 5.30pm on Sundays, and dinner at £85 for three courses (2026), all best booked. For a pub, the Mount Inn at Stanton is 2.4 miles south (closed on Mondays and on Sunday evenings), and Broadway, 2 miles north, has the rest.

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When to come

Spring and autumn are the seasons for the walk above, when the climb to Shenberrow is firm underfoot. In May the Winchcombe Cotswolds Walking Festival (21 to 23 May in 2027) has started some of its guided walks from Buckland in past years. Buckland has another claim on the calendar: in 1909 Cecil Sharp took down a wassail song here from William Bayliss, and its verses went into the Gloucestershire Wassail that Vaughan Williams arranged. Our story of wassailing tells it. The 606 does not run on Sundays.