Stanton, Snowshill and the edge

The Stanton, Snowshill and the edge walk is a 6.6-mile (10.6km) circular walk from Stanton, up the Cotswold Way and across to Snowshill and its manor. It is moderate, with some steep sections and stiles, and takes three and a half to four and a half hours. It ends at the Mount Inn, Stanton's Donnington pub.

It is the third of the Cotswolds National Landscape's Cotswold Way Circular Walks. Its current leaflet, from 2024, and the National Landscape's route page both give 6 miles (9.7km), and our own line along the mapped paths measures about 6.6 miles (10.6km). After the climb up the Cotswold Way it crosses to Snowshill by a National Trust wood, and comes back along the top to drop down to Stanton by a steep-sided track. If you turn back at the cattle grid, the short version is 2.5 miles (4km) and takes one and a half to two and a half hours.

Stanton

Stanton, where the walk starts and ends, is a stone village at the foot of the hill that an architect restored in the early twentieth century. It lies on the lower slopes, 3 miles south of Broadway, and its conservation area appraisal records the village as land of Winchcombe Abbey in Domesday. Sir Philip Stott, an architect from Oldham, bought it in 1906 and restored it, and in 1907 lit it by electricity from his generator at Stanton Court. The appraisal counts one Grade I building and 49 Grade II entries in the conservation area, and two at II*: Warren House, built after 1577 by the Warne or Warren family, and Warne Cottage.

The Grade I building is St Michael and All Angels, of the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. Its listing records a chancel rebuilt in 1874, later nineteenth-century work by Blomfield, an east window of 1918 by Comper, in which medieval glass has been reset, and a seventeenth-century pulpit.

Littleworth Wood and Snowshill

The middle of the walk leaves the Cotswold Way at the cattle grid and crosses through the National Trust's Littleworth Wood to Snowshill and its manor. Beyond the wood, the road brings you down into Snowshill between the pub and the church. St Barnabas is Grade II and was built in 1864 with a west tower. Snowshill's appraisal records the church and nearby cottages as a filming location for Bridget Jones's Diary in 2000.

The walk turns off by the entrance to Snowshill Manor and Garden. Charles Paget Wade bought the manor in 1919, filled it with craftsmanship of every kind, from bicycles to armour, and gave it to the National Trust in 1951. The house is listed Grade II*, and its garden was laid out from a plan by M. H. Baillie Scott. Wolf's Cove, a model village, and the Priest's House are in the grounds, and there is a café, a shop and a second-hand bookshop. The manor charges for entry; National Trust members go free. Our guide to Cotswold houses and castles puts it among the region's great houses.

Back along the top

The return is the hardest part of the walk: a steep climb out of the valley below Snowshill, a mile back up the Cotswold Way, then a steep-sided track down to Stanton. The way back crosses a stream by a footbridge and a boardwalk, then climbs steeply through a narrow field to an old iron gate and follows a farm track to a gate between two woods. Rejoining the Cotswold Way, you pass a house and old quarries on the climb back to the cattle grid.

The last mile is the steep-sided track down to Stanton. The leaflet asks you to watch your footing here, and points out the view that opens up below, over Stanton and across the Severn Vale into Wales. You come out at the top of the village by the Mount Inn.

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Food and drink

There are two pubs on the walk, the Mount Inn at the end in Stanton and a pub in Snowshill, and a café at Snowshill Manor. The Mount Inn, at the top of Stanton's High Street, is a Donnington pub, and the leaflet notes that it closes on Mondays. When we checked its website, it opened Tuesday to Saturday from noon to 3pm and 6pm to 11pm, with food to 2pm and 9pm, and on Sundays from noon to 4pm, with food to 3pm and no Sunday evening opening. Snowshill's pub, the Snowshill Arms, is also a Donnington house, a little under halfway round. It opens from 11am to 3pm and 6pm to 10pm from Monday to Saturday and from 11am to 6pm on Sundays; we could not confirm its food times, so ring 01386 852653 before you rely on lunch there. For a night nearby, Buckland Manor is a country house hotel in ten acres of gardens at Buckland, under a mile off the route, and our places to stay in Broadway has more.

Parking and getting there

Park in the parish council car park next to the cricket ground, on the main road out of Stanton. The Mount Inn's car park is for customers only, and the leaflet asks walkers not to park in the village centre. By bus, the 606 from Cheltenham or Broadway stops at the Stanton turn on the main road, half a mile (0.8km) from the start, about every two hours from Monday to Saturday and not on Sundays.

Paths, stiles, gates and dogs

Go prepared for two stiles and two steep stretches. The 2024 leaflet's directions still cross two stiles on the climb from Stanton, although the National Landscape's route page rates the walk stile free. Otherwise there are field gates, a cattle grid, a footbridge and a boardwalk, and short stretches of road near Littleworth Wood and Snowshill. The leaflet names two steep places, the narrow field below the iron gate and the steep-sided track down to the Mount Inn, and asks you to watch your footing on the climb from Stanton too.

The leaflet says nothing about dogs or livestock. At Snowshill Manor the National Trust allows dogs on short leads in the grounds outside the formal gardens, but not in the house or the formal gardens themselves.

More walks nearby

The shortest walk nearby is the 2-mile loop from Snowshill by Snowswood, down into the valley and back past the manor. The National Landscape's walk from Broadway to Broadway Tower follows the same edge further north, and the Cotswold Way from Broadway to Wood Stanway comes down the hill into Stanton. Beyond it, the walk from Hailes to Beckbury Camp climbs the same edge, and our guide to the Cotswold Way has the whole trail. Broadway is 4 miles from Stanton by road.