Painswick and Painswick Beacon

The Painswick Beacon walk is a 5-mile (8.2km) circular walk from the middle of Painswick to the top of Painswick Beacon and back, with about 250m of climbing. It is moderate and takes two and a half to three hours, over Iron Age ramparts and home along the Cotswold Way past the Rococo Garden to the Falcon Inn.

It leaves the town by its northern lanes and swings out across the fields to the farms at Holcombe before the climb. It is a popular route. We have checked the line against the mapped paths but not yet walked it ourselves.

Painswick, St Mary's and the Falcon

The walk starts and ends in New Street, beside the churchyard of St Mary's. The church is listed Grade I: late fourteenth century, with a nave of about 1480, a fifteenth-century tower, and a restoration by Waller in 1883. The churchyard is notable for its clipped yews and its seventeenth to nineteenth-century tombs, many of them carved by the Bryan family of Painswick masons.

Opposite stands the Falcon, an inn with a datestone of 1711 at its door and windows of the early nineteenth century. Its listing records a service wing behind of the later 1800s. The Falcon Inn takes guests today and is the obvious place to finish.

The Holcombe farms

North-west of the town the lane runs past three listed houses in a row. Holcombe Farmhouse has 1700 and the initials SRS carved over its door. Holcombe House beyond it is Grade II*, a sixteenth or seventeenth-century house with three main gables to the road, extended early in the twentieth century by Detmar Blow, with a seventeenth-century dovecote to the north. Upper Holcombe Farmhouse, of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, has a stone-slated pentice on four square stone piers over its entrance.

Painswick Beacon

The Beacon, also called Painswick or Kimsbury hill, is a large Iron Age hillfort. The Victoria County History records a tradition linking it to Earl Godwin, and Royalist troops held it in 1643 after the failed siege of Gloucester, a story told in our piece on Charles I's ghost. A golf course was laid out over the hill in 1891. The fort is a scheduled monument, damaged by quarrying and by the golf course but, in Historic England's words, surviving comparatively well.

Walkers report cattle grazing on the hill. The way down passes the old Catsbrain quarry and runs beside the fairways, and walkers say the course is busy on Sundays, so you may wait for players to finish a hole.

The Rococo Garden

On the way back the route walks down the B4073 beside the grounds of the Rococo Garden. It was laid out in the eighteenth century as a pleasure garden for the owner of Painswick House, painted by Thomas Robins in 1748, abandoned and planted with timber in the 1950s, and restored from that painting in the decades since. It opens daily, 10am to 5pm with last entry at 4pm, until 1 November 2026, with free dog weekends on 7 and 8, 14 and 15, and 21 and 22 November (10am to 4pm), and it has a café, the Coffee Wagon. Our guide to the great Cotswold gardens has more.

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What walkers report

About a quarter of the route is on paved lanes and roads, and the rest on field paths, grass and earth tracks. Reviewers report mud in places, especially in winter and early spring, and a few steep, rocky climbs. Several mention the crossing of the B4073 and a short walk beside the road with only a narrow path, which needs care with children. One walker in June 2026 found a field path overgrown with thorns and walked through a herd of cattle, and another said the way is less well marked once you leave the Cotswold Way, so carry the map.

In summer reviewers found it quiet and partly shaded. Dogs are welcome on most of it, on a lead where there is livestock.

Food, parking and getting there

Painswick has cafés and pubs at both ends of the walk, and reviewers mention coffee shops in the town. The car park at Stamages Lane is long stay, with 56 bays and public toilets that Stroud District Council lists as open 7am to 7pm, and walkers report it and the nearby streets fill early on fine days. The 66 bus from Stroud stops in the town, about hourly from Monday to Saturday and every two hours on Sundays. For a night here, The Painswick is a hotel a short walk from the start, St Anne's is a B&B beside the route, and our pick of places to stay in Painswick has the rest.

Longer walks from Painswick

The route shares its last miles with stage 8 of the Cotswold Way, which comes over the Beacon from Birdlip. For a shorter valley walk from the same town, the Painswick Stream follows the old mill stream south of the church. Over the hill to the east, the Laurie Lee Wildlife Way starts at Bulls Cross, and to the south-west the Cotswold Way runs on to Haresfield Beacon.