Upper and Lower Oddington

What to see

St Nicholas's Church, Grade I, is open every day and free. Its Norman nave of the twelfth century is now the south aisle, a tower and a wider nave were added in the thirteenth century, and because the parish built a new church in 1852 and used this one only for funerals, nothing was modernised. Whitewash applied in the 1620s hid the north wall's Doom until 1913: Christ in judgement, the trumpeting angels, St Peter at the gate of a tower-like heaven, and on the right the damned driven past a gibbet and a cauldron to the mouth of Hell, which the National Churches Trust calls perhaps the largest Doom in Britain. The church has no electricity or water, so come on a bright day. In the churchyard the monument to Margaret Parsons is listed Grade II* on its own. In May 2026 the church launched an appeal, The Next 1000 Years, to raise £350,000 over three years for work on its roof, windows, stonework and lead.

The Church of the Holy Ascension, built in 1852 by S W Daukes in the Early English style and listed Grade II, is the church the villages use, with a two-storey north porch said to have been designed by the rector, encaustic tiles in the chancel and glass by Wailes, Clayton and Bell, and Powell. Lower Oddington also has Oddington House, Grade II*, and a run of listed cottages, the old post office, the old bakehouse and the forge among them. Nothing is open, but the street is the walk.

A morning here

Park in Lower Oddington and walk down Church Road, 400m, to St Nicholas's, and spend the half hour the painting needs. Walk back up through the village past the Fox, on to the Holy Ascension and on up the road to Upper Oddington's narrow green, a mile of quiet lane in all. Lunch at the Fox from midday. In the afternoon, the farm shop at Daylesford is about 2 miles by road, and the Adlestrop sign about 1.5 miles to the north-east.

Walks

Adlestrop, Daylesford and Lower Oddington is the 5-mile (8.2km) loop from Adlestrop's village hall that comes past St Nicholas's on Church Road and stops at the Fox near its end, after the Daylesford estate drives and the farm shop. Walkers' reports on AllTrails from 2024 to 2026 warn about its one bad stretch, about 530m on the A436 north of Lower Oddington with no pavement or verge, a narrow bend and fast traffic, so start from here and walk it as a there-and-back to Daylesford instead. Kingham, Daylesford and the Evenlode is the flat 4.4-mile loop on the far side of the river.

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Food and drink

The Fox at Oddington, on the High Street in Lower Oddington, is one of the Daylesford Stays pubs, with six rooms and the four-bedroom Coachman's House across the road, which sleeps eight, in a listed building of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century that was already selling beer in 1856. Check-in for the pub rooms is from 3pm to 10pm and check-out by 11am, and each room has one parking space at the front. It serves the pub and pizza menu at lunch and dinner most days (bar snacks and pizza at Thursday lunch), with Sunday lunch from midday to 4pm and bar snacks and pizza until 8.30pm, and dogs go anywhere in the pub. Upper Oddington's Horse and Groom, an eighteenth-century house that was a pub by the late nineteenth century, was sold in July 2025 and has been closed since September 2025 for a major refurbishment; CAMRA's pub guide expects it to reopen by 1 January 2027. Daylesford's farm shop, with the Old Spot and the Trough, is about 2 miles east.

When to come

Any bright day from March to October is right for the Doom, which is faint and unlit, and services are held in St Nicholas's on the third Sunday of the month from April to September, on St Nicholas Day, 6 December, and by candlelight on Christmas Eve. The villages are quiet in every season. When the Slaughters, a few miles west, are busy on a summer weekend, the Oddingtons have the same stone, a better church and an empty lane, which is why we send people here.