Snowshill and Snowswood

The Snowshill and Snowswood walk is a 2.1-mile (3.4km) loop from Pipers Grove car park at Snowshill above Broadway. It is short but steep, with about 127m of up and down, and takes about an hour and a quarter. It drops into the valley west of the village and finishes past the church, Snowshill Manor and the Snowshill Arms.

It is the shortest walk we cover from Snowshill. Allow half a day with a visit to the manor.

Snowshill and St Barnabas

Snowshill had 159 residents at the 2021 census. It appears in Domesday as Snawesille, grew as a farming village whose main industry was wool, with its own quarries for stone, and from 1759 to 1919 its manor belonged largely to absentee landlords. Tewkesbury Borough Council made it a conservation area in 1971.

St Barnabas’s Church, on the line near the end of the walk, was built in 1864 of well-squared stone, with a west tower and a clock. Its listing notes a fifteenth-century octagonal font and a pulpit of Jacobean panelling on a later base. The church and the cottages beside it appear in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary, made in 2000.

Snowshill Manor

The road back to the car park runs past Snowshill Manor, listed Grade II*: a house of the seventeenth century, about 1720 and the nineteenth, altered from 1919 to 1923 by and for Charles Paget Wade. Wade bought it in 1919 and filled it with his collection, from bicycles to armour, and gave the manor and the collection to the National Trust in 1951. The garden has the Wolf’s Cove model village and the Priest’s House. In November 2026 it opens at weekends only, from late morning to mid afternoon, and times vary by date, so check the Trust’s calendar before you go. National Trust members go free.

Our guide to Cotswold country houses has more on Wade’s collection, and our guide to the Cotswolds with a dog says where dogs can go at the manor.

Into the valley

Most of the walk is out of sight of the village, in the valley to the west. The footpath down from the road crosses the stream and climbs to the edge of Snowswood, and a restricted byway runs along the top of the far side past Great Brockhamton Farm, close to Littleworth Wood, which the National Landscape’s Stanton walk passes through. Coming back, steps drop from the byway to a path that crosses the pastures and the stream again before a track climbs to the lane below the church.

What walkers report

Walkers call this a short walk with a lot of hill: steep down into the valley and steep up again, with only the byway along the top to level out. They report mud near the stream and slippery slopes after rain, as in the winter of 2024 to 2025.

In summer they report overgrown stretches, nettles and insects in the wooded parts, in 2025 and again in September 2026. Sheep graze the pastures, and walkers keep dogs on a lead there. OpenStreetMap records one stile on the line, about two-thirds of the way round, with gates and kissing gates elsewhere, and walkers in 2023 and 2024 found fallen trees across the path after storms. Walkers in 2024 and 2025 finished with lunch in the garden of the Snowshill Arms, in the village near the end of the loop; it opens from 11am to 3pm and 6pm to 10pm from Monday to Saturday and from 11am to 6pm on Sundays, but ring 01386 852653 to check food times.

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Parking and getting there

Pipers Grove car park, on the Broadway road just north of the village, is a small Tewkesbury Borough Council car park with 25 spaces and no disabled bays, and the council lists no charges for it. The National Trust’s own car parks are for visitors to the manor. No bus serves Snowshill. It is 2.5 miles by road from Broadway green, up Church Street, and the nearest stations are Moreton-in-Marsh and Evesham.

Food and staying nearby

The Snowshill Arms in the village, near the end of the loop, is the one place to eat that walkers mention, and some finish with lunch in its garden; it opens from 11am to 3pm and 6pm to 10pm from Monday to Saturday and from 11am to 6pm on Sundays; ring 01386 852653 for food times. In flowering season, Cotswold Lavender has about 18 hectares of lavender fields at Snowshill, open for a few weeks from mid-June to early August, with dogs welcome on a short lead. For a night nearby, our pick of places to stay in Broadway is 2.5 miles down the hill.

Longer walks nearby

The National Landscape’s Stanton, Snowshill and the edge is a 6.6-mile loop that comes up through Littleworth Wood to Snowshill from Stanton. From Broadway, our loop by Pye Corner climbs to the Cotswold Way, and the Cotswold Way from Broadway to Wood Stanway runs along the top west of here.