Stow-on-the-Wold and Maugersbury

The Stow-on-the-Wold and Maugersbury walk is a 3.75-mile (5.5km) circular walk without stiles from the Cross in the Market Square of Stow-on-the-Wold. It takes about two hours, with 130m of ups and downs, dropping to Hyde Mill in the valley and climbing back. The Porch House, a Jacobean town house with a datestone of 1615 and now an inn, is a few steps from the start.

The walk is one of the Cotswolds National Landscape's Miles Without Stiles routes. Its leaflet gives the distance as 3.75 miles and 5.5km and its route page as 6km, which do not quite agree; our line along the paths comes to about 5.9km. The leaflet was last checked by its authors in December 2023.

The Square and Digbeth Street

The walk starts at the Cross in the southern half of Stow's Market Square and leaves down Digbeth Street, past the Porch House. The town grew round its market square, and the Cross is late medieval, restored in 1878, with carved figures in its gabled head; it is both listed and a scheduled monument.

A few steps down Digbeth Street, the Porch House is a Brakspear inn with rooms that calls itself England's oldest inn, a claim we have not been able to confirm. What its listing does say is that it is a good Jacobean town house, possibly sixteenth century, remodelled in the early seventeenth with a datestone of 1615, and said to stand on the site of a medieval hospice. It is listed Grade II*, under its old name of the Royalist Hotel. In Fountain Court off Digbeth Street, the Old Bakery Tearoom makes all its food on the premises and lets dogs in.

Maugersbury and the Fosse Way

The first mile takes you down Park Street out of the town to Maugersbury Manor, then west along a tree-lined road to the Fosse Way. The Victoria County History takes Maugersbury to be the parish's first settlement, older than the market town of Stow, which was anciently called Stow St Edward. From the crossroads below the manor, the tree-lined road runs 800m to the Fosse Way, and the walk turns down South Hill past St Edward's Well, hidden in the trees.

The Fosse Way is the A429 here, and the leaflet asks you to cross it with extreme caution, using the first traffic island. On the far side is the gate lodge of Nether Swell Manor, built around 1903 by E Guy Dawber at the entrance to a half-mile drive, with tall gatepiers topped by stone balls.

Hyde Mill and Nether Swell

Hyde Mill, at the bottom of the valley, is the walk's lowest point and its turning point. The bridleway follows a private drive down for 850m towards the mill, past Hyde Mill Farm, and a track round a field brings you out near it. The way back up starts by a large equestrian training centre, with a run of white gates and some steps, then climbs through Nether Swell Manor Farm. Our loop from Stow to Lower Swell also passes Hyde Mill.

Nether Swell Manor itself was built in 1903, 1906 and 1909 by Dawber for Sir John Scott, a country house in a free Jacobean style, with plasterwork by Marcel Boulenger in the wing of 1909. Higher up, past a strip of trees and a wood, the path passes South Hill Farm, whose listed farmhouse is early nineteenth century in the Gothick style, with ogee-headed windows.

Wragg's Row, the Unicorn and St Edward's

The last half mile brings you back into Stow along Wragg's Row and past the Unicorn to St Edward's Church. Number 4 Wragg's Row is a seventeenth-century cottage of one and a half storeys under a Cotswold stone roof, and numbers 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9 are listed as well. The Unicorn, on the corner of Sheep Street and the Fosse Way, is mid eighteenth century in its present form, with an angled bay added in the early nineteenth and a nineteenth-century extension along the Fosse Way with two arched coachways.

Church Street leads round past St Edward's, Stow's parish church, listed Grade I. It has Saxon origins and Norman work in the nave, was extended in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and has a fifteenth-century tower. After the Battle of Stow on 21 March 1646, the last battle of the first Civil War, the Victoria County History records that more than 1,600 prisoners were held in the church. It is open every day.

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Food, parking and toilets

The food on this walk is all in Stow, where the leaflet points you to the cafés and pubs. Besides the Porch House and the tearoom, the Old Butchers on Park Street is a restaurant in a former butcher's shop, in the Michelin Guide and closed on Sundays and Mondays, and the Bell at Stow, also on Park Street, is a Young's pub with rooms. For a night in the town, see our places to stay in Stow-on-the-Wold.

The leaflet suggests parking at Tesco's public car park or the Oddington Road car park. The council's car park by Tesco, the Fosseway car park (GL54 1BX), is free. There are public toilets on the Market Square, costing 50p.

Paths, gates and roads

There are no stiles on the walk, but there are steps, gates and two crossings of the Fosse Way. The route uses pavements, an unmade road, a surfaced private drive, a bridleway and field paths, with steps by the equestrian centre and a run of white gates below Nether Swell Manor Farm. The National Landscape rates it for unsurfaced paths and basic fitness.

Both crossings of the Fosse Way are by traffic islands, and there is a stretch along its pavement on the way back into town. The leaflet says nothing about dogs or livestock, but the route passes an equestrian centre and farm fields, so keep a dog close there.

More walks nearby

The longest walk from here is the loop from Bourton to Stow and back by Lower Slaughter, at more than 9 miles. From Moreton-in-Marsh, the walk to Batsford and Dorn is another of the National Landscape's routes without stiles, 4 miles with less climbing, and it starts at the war memorial on the High Street. Our guide to Cotswold pubs has more on the Porch House's claim and others like it.