Stanway

Stanway House and its fountain

Stanway House is a Jacobean manor that is still a family home, and it opens only on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in June, July and August, from 2pm to 5pm. That rule is the thing to plan around. The Victoria County History thinks Sir Paul Tracy began the present house in the early seventeenth century and that Sir John Tracy extended it later that century. The south front is late seventeenth century. The Tracys' descendants, the Charteris family, Earls of Wemyss, have owned it since 1835 and live there now.

The fountain is the modern surprise. A single jet rises from the canal in the water garden, and the house gives its height as about 92m, the tallest fountain in Britain. It was switched on for the first time on 5 June 2004, and the house calls it the highest gravity fountain in the world: the water falls to it from the hill above, with no pump. The house does not publish the times it plays, so ask when you arrive. The house's own page listed house and fountain at £12 for an adult and £30 for a family, and the fountain alone at £9, but the page carried no date, so take the prices as a guide. Historic Houses members go in free.

The gatehouse beside the church is what everyone photographs: gabled, arched and far grander than the lane it stands on. Historic England's listing dates it to about 1630 and suggests Timothy Strong of Barrington as the mason. The county history was more cautious and thought it nearer 1700. Either way it is listed Grade I, like the house.

The tithe barn, the church and the cricket pavilion

The tithe barn across the lane was built around 1370 for Tewkesbury Abbey, which held Stanway at the Domesday survey and kept it in hand until 1533. Sir Philip Stott, the architect who restored Stanton, restored the barn in 1927 for the Earl of Wemyss, and it is the village hall today, listed Grade I. St Peter's church next to it keeps twelfth-century masonry in its nave and chancel, a tower begun in the thirteenth century and raised in the fifteenth, and a heavy restoration of 1896. It is Grade II*.

The oddest listed building in the village is the cricket pavilion on the field by the road. J M Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, was a frequent guest at Stanway House in the early twentieth century, and in 1925 he gave the cricket club a pavilion, built by John Oakey of Winchcombe. It is timber framed, clad in larch poles and thatched, and it stands on 25 staddle stones, five rows of five, the mushroom-shaped stones that once kept rats out of granaries. The listing says it appears to be externally unchanged. Stories that Barrie promised the pavilion if he took a hat-trick are told locally. We found no record of it.

An afternoon here

Come on an open Tuesday or Thursday. Walk in from Stanton along the Cotswold Way, about 2 miles (3km) through level fields, and arrive at the gatehouse a little before 2pm. See the house and the water garden, wait for the fountain, and take tea in the tea room. Then cross the lane to the church and the tithe barn, walk down to the cricket pavilion, and walk back to Stanton for a drink at the Mount Inn at the top of the village street. On any other day the gatehouse, church and barn are all visible from the lane.

Walks from Stanway

The Cotswold Way crosses the park on its second section, Broadway to Wood Stanway, 6.5 miles (10.5km), which comes down off the edge into Stanton and then runs level through the fields past the church and the gatehouse to the hamlet of Wood Stanway, a mile south. The next section climbs from Wood Stanway to Beckbury Camp and drops to Hailes Abbey and Winchcombe, 5.4 miles. Our circular walk from Hailes to Beckbury Camp covers the hill above Wood Stanway. Wood Stanway has no timetabled bus, only the bookable Robin, so plan the way back before you set out.

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Food and drink

Stanway has no pub and no shop. The tea room at Stanway House serves cream teas, cakes and ice cream on open afternoons only. The nearest pub is the Mount Inn at Stanton, a Donnington pub about 2 miles away on foot by the Cotswold Way. Our guide to Cotswold pubs and the breweries behind them covers it. Hayles Fruit Farm at Hailes, about 3.5 miles by road, has a farm shop and café, closed on Mondays. For the fuller choice, Winchcombe is 5 miles away.

When to come

The house sets the calendar: summer Tuesdays and Thursdays, and nothing else. Outside the opening, spring and autumn are the best walking months, and the gatehouse looks its best in low afternoon sun. Stanway is never busy. The people you meet will mostly be walking the Cotswold Way.