A Five Valleys weekend: Stroud, Painswick, Slad and Sapperton by car

The Five Valleys are the quiet side of the Cotswolds: steep wooded valleys meeting at Stroud, mill towns in the bottoms and open commons on the tops, and a quieter feel than the famous villages of the north. This weekend by car, based in Painswick, takes Stroud's Saturday farmers' market, Painswick's churchyard and Rococo Garden, Minchinhampton Common and Nailsworth on Saturday, then Slad, Bisley and Sapperton on Sunday. No drive is longer than about 20 minutes, and the two walks add up to about 10 miles.

Every place, walk and pub here has a page of ours, with hours checked in October 2026. Our guide to the Five Valleys has the whole region, and the opening times below assume a weekend between February and October. The winter changes are at the end.

Why this route

The order follows the week. Stroud's farmers' market runs on Saturday mornings only, so Saturday starts there, and the Stroud District Council car parks are free on Sundays, which suits the quieter day. Painswick's garden and churchyard need daylight and an open gate, so they go on the Saturday, and the commons come in the afternoon, when the light is long across the grass.

Sunday is the valleys themselves. The Laurie Lee Wildlife Way is the walk of the region, round the valley Lee wrote about in Cider with Rosie, with lunch at his pub at the end and his grave across the road. From there the lanes climb to Bisley on the wold and drop to Sapperton on the lip of the Frome valley, where the Thames and Severn Canal went into a tunnel more than 2 miles long. Each of those is an hour, not a day, which is why they belong together.

Where to base yourself

Painswick, for two nights. The Falcon on New Street has eleven rooms on the Cotswold Way and lets dogs into every room and every public area; the Painswick is the hotel, with valley views from many rooms, a restaurant, Sauce, in the Michelin Guide, and passes to the Rococo Garden when you book direct. The Falcon is listed on Expedia and Hotels.com with check-in from 3pm, check-out by 11am and free parking. Both are a short walk from the churchyard, and the Butchers Arms at Sheepscombe is 10 minutes away for a country pub supper.

On the other side of Stroud, the Amberley Inn has thirteen rooms looking over the Woodchester valley with the commons at the door, and the Bear of Rodborough sits on Rodborough Common itself. Either puts Saturday's walk on the doorstep and adds 15 minutes to Sunday.

Saturday: the market, Painswick and the commons

The market is on Cornhill from 9am, with producers selling what they grow and make. Drive the ten minutes to Painswick by half past ten, and give the churchyard three quarters of an hour: the yews are clipped, and the legend of the ninety-nine trees is a legend, since nobody has published a reliable count. The church opens from 9am.

The Rococo Garden is a short walk from the church and the Painswick end of the day. A trust has run it since 1988 and calls it the only complete surviving Rococo garden in England. It is steep, with follies, a maze and a play area, and the café serves lunch from midday. Then cross to Minchinhampton for the walk across the common, stile-free and open, past the Iron Age earthwork of the Bulwarks to Amberley, where the Black Horse is the walkers' pub, with food every day and a conservatory over the valley. Finish in Nailsworth, where the council lists its car parks without a charge, and theEgypt Mill feeds you by its waterwheel from 5pm.

Sunday: Slad, Bisley and Sapperton

Leave the car at Bulls Cross, the free layby on the B4070 above Slad, and walk Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust's loop through Longridge Wood and over Swift's Hill, with Lee's poems on ten posts along the way. It is 5 miles with steep climbs and takes three hours at a steady pace, longer with stops, which is the argument for an early start. The Woolpack is a detour of about 400m down to the road, and it serves Sunday lunch until 3.30pm.

Bisley is ten minutes away. Walk down to the wells, seven spouts under a stone screen that the village dresses with flowers every Ascension Day, then up George Street for the lock-up and the Bear, the old courthouse with its colonnade. In Sapperton, the craftsmen Ernest Gimson and Sidney and Ernest Barnsley are buried under plain stones by St Kenelm's, and their houses stand in the street. The lane down to Daneway is steep and single track. At the bottom are the tunnel portal, restored by the Cotswold Canals Trust in 1996, and the Daneway Inn, built in 1784 for the men who dug the tunnel. Nobody may enter the tunnel, which is blocked by a fall a short way in. The Bell at Sapperton, up in the village, served food until 7pm on Sundays in its summer hours when we checked.

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Swaps for rain or a quieter day

In rain, swap the common walk for the Museum in the Park in Stroud, free and step-free, open Tuesday to Sunday with a lift and the town's history, and leave Swift's Hill for a clear morning. Woodchester Mansion, a Victorian house never finished, opens on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays from Good Friday to 1 November (in 2026), 11am to 5pm, with bats watched on camera. Park at the National Trust's Buckholt car park, £4 for non-members: the mansion asks you to bring cash, as there is no mobile signal for card payments.

For a shorter Sunday walk, do the 2-mile loop on Rodborough Common, nearly level on grass, or the Painswick Stream, 3 miles past five old mills from the car park. Without a car, Stroud station is about an hour and a half from Paddington, and Stagecoach's 66 bus reaches Painswick in about ten minutes, hourly from Monday to Saturday and every two hours on Sundays (from Stroud at 9.35am, 11.35am, 1.35pm, 3.35pm and 5.35pm in the October 2026 timetable).

The honest limits

The Five Valleys are steep. The lanes are narrow, the walks climb, and the road into Daneway is single track with few passing places. The commons are grazed by cattle from spring, usually May, into the autumn, and from 1 March to 31 July the Countryside Code asks for dogs on a short lead on open access land, which includes both commons.

Some things here are seasonal. The Rococo Garden closes after 1 November until its snowdrop season opens in mid-January (17 January on its snowdrop page), apart from three free dog weekends in November, and in February every visit must be booked in advance.Dunkirk Mill near Nailsworth, where a waterwheel turns the machines that finished the cloth, opens only on set days from April to September, with guided visits at 2pm and 3pm that should be booked, as places are limited, so on those days it fits Saturday afternoon in place of the walk. The Museum in the Park is shut on Mondays all year, and closed for cleaning from 22 December 2025 to 24 January 2026, so check its site for this winter.