Hailes and Beckbury Camp

The Hailes and Beckbury Camp walk is a 3.5-mile (5.6km) circular walk from Hayles Fruit Farm, about 3 miles by road from Winchcombe, up the monks' track on the Cotswold Way to the hillfort at Beckbury Camp. It is moderate, with steep sections and three stiles, takes about two and a quarter hours, and ends at the farm's tearoom.

It is the fifteenth of the Cotswolds National Landscape's Cotswold Way Circular Walks. After the hillfort it comes down the edge of a wood towards Wood Stanway and returns past a twelfth-century church and the ruins of Hailes Abbey. Most of the fields on the way are pasture.

The monks' track and Beckbury Camp

From the bend in the lane by the farm, the Cotswold Way climbs the hill along a stone track, then crosses two fields towards a group of trees on the skyline. These mark Beckbury Camp. The leaflet describes it as a hillfort with two of its sides formed by the natural edge of the hill, and says little is known about the monument there: a nineteenth-century stone monument, built of limestone, also known as Cromwell's Seat. The story goes that Thomas Cromwell watched Hailes Abbey burn from this spot after the Dissolution; the leaflet is careful to call it an allegation.

The monument is a short, steep climb through the trees from the waymarker post, and you come back the same way. Once you are back at the post, the leaflet says there is no more climbing on the walk.

Down to Wood Stanway

The descent follows the edge of a wood over three stiles to a pair of gates above the hamlet of Wood Stanway. From here the route turns west along the Winchcombe Way, a 42-mile figure of eight whose eastern loop runs by Farmcote, Snowshill, Stanton, Stanway and Hailes. Field gates and two wooden gates lead to a wide path and the lane down to Hailes.

Hailes church

The little church on the left of the lane is older than the abbey; the leaflet says by half a century. Its listing dates it to the twelfth century, altered in the fourteenth, fifteenth and seventeenth, and grades it I, with a porch added in 1905. Inside, the walls carry medieval paintings: a giant St Christopher on the north wall, a hunting scene on the south, and in the chancel coats of arms, a saint and mythical animals. The leaflet dates the paintings to the thirteenth century and the listing to the fourteenth. The floor has medieval tiles, which the leaflet says came from the abbey after the Dissolution, and seventeenth-century pews stand against the screen. The listing calls the interior little altered since the seventeenth century. The leaflet adds that the church served visitors and pilgrims to the abbey, whose own church ordinary people were not allowed to use.

Hailes Abbey

Across the lane are the ruins of Hailes Abbey, founded in 1246 by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, after a vow made in a storm at sea, and given to the Cistercians, with its first monks from Beaulieu. In 1270 Edmund of Cornwall gave it a relic said to be a phial of Christ's blood, and pilgrims came from far away to see it. At the Reformation the relic was denounced, the leaflet says, as honey coloured with saffron. The monks signed the abbey's surrender on Christmas Eve 1539. What stands today, parts of the cloister walls and the lower walls of the ranges around it, is listed Grade I. The National Trust owns it and English Heritage runs it, opening it on the first weekend of each month for tours booked online.

The abbey's museum and ticket point are level, with a ramp into grounds of gentle grass slopes, as our guide to the accessible Cotswolds describes.

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Food, parking and getting there

Hayles Fruit Farm is the start and the end: a farm shop, the Orchard Kitchen tearoom, pick your own in season and its own Hayles cider. It opens Tuesday to Sunday from 9am to 5pm and closes on Mondays; brunch is served until 3pm, and at weekends the Orchard Kitchen takes walk-ins only. The walk leaflet puts parking there at £2.50, paid in the shop and taken off what you spend in the farm shop or tearoom, and asks walkers to pay so the arrangement can continue. The farm’s own site does not give the fee, so ring 01242 602123 to check it. The postcode is GL54 5PB. The 606 bus between Cheltenham and Chipping Campden runs Monday to Saturday, with no Sunday service, and stops about a mile from the start in Toddington, or half a mile from the lane where the walk reaches Hailes. For a night nearby, North Farmcote is a farmhouse bed and breakfast in the hills above Winchcombe, built around 1840 as a dower house for Lord Sudeley's mother.

Winchcombe, about 3 miles away by road, has more rooms and pubs: see our page on places to stay in Winchcombe.

Paths and stiles

The leaflet's summary mentions two stiles, but its directions cross three, all on the way down beside the wood. Otherwise there are field gates, bridleway and lane. The leaflet describes the optional climb through the trees to the monument as steep.

More walks from Winchcombe

From Winchcombe itself, the walk to Belas Knap climbs to a Neolithic long barrow, and the short walk to Sudeley Castle goes round the castle grounds. Further north on the Cotswold Way, the circular walk from Stanton climbs to the same edge.