Winchcombe

I had read the fact before I arrived, but reading it and then standing in the chapel garden with the information newly physical was a different thing. Catherine Parr — the sixth wife, the one who outlived Henry VIII, the most educated queen of her era — is buried here, in the chapel of Sudeley Castle, in a sixteenth-century tomb with a white marble effigy. The chapel is small and quiet and slightly damp and smells of old stone and cut flowers from someone’s garden, and when I stood in front of the tomb I thought about the distance between that biography and this village, and how strange it is that great lives end in small places.

Winchcombe is undersold in the Cotswolds literature, which is to say it appears in the footnotes when it deserves a chapter. The main street has good proportions — wide enough to have been a medieval market place, stone buildings of various periods all using the same local limestone — and the scale is human in a way that Bourton and Burford sometimes are not. The Winchcombe Pottery is at one end of the town, a working studio that has been producing domestic stoneware since 1926 in a tradition that connects directly to Arts and Crafts principles. They sell seconds from a box by the door, and I bought a mug for four pounds that I have used every morning since.

The approach to Sudeley Castle from the town is through the Kitchen Garden, which is enormous and impeccably maintained and smells different in every season — in May it is all apple blossom and warming earth, in August the smell of ripe tomatoes and cut grass, in October the fermented sweetness of fallen fruit. The castle itself has had a violent history — damaged in the Civil War, abandoned, restored in the nineteenth century — but the gardens are what stay with you. The Queens’ Garden, with its box-edged knot garden and the ruined banqueting hall as its backdrop, has been designed and redesigned across five hundred years and has arrived at a kind of accumulated confidence that takes centuries to achieve.

The walk from Winchcombe to Belas Knap takes about an hour and a half on a clear path up through the beech hanger woods above the town. Belas Knap is a Neolithic long barrow — a chambered communal tomb — built around 3800 BC, which is five and a half thousand years ago, which is a number that stops making sense if you stare at it too long. The mound is still largely intact, the dry-stone false entrance still standing, the forecourt still defined. On the morning I was there, there was no one else, just jackdaws in the trees at the wood’s edge and a view south over the Severn Vale. The combination of that view and that date is one of the more vertiginous experiences available in England.

The pubs are good and unshowy. The White Hart is the one I returned to, a coaching inn with a covered courtyard and a menu that has local provenance without performing it — trout from the nearby rivers, lamb from the Cotswold hills, a sticky toffee pudding that arrives in a pool of toffee sauce deep enough to qualify as a sauce lake. The warmth in the evenings, with the fire going and the low beams doing what low beams do to a room, is the physical sensation of what the word “cosiness” is supposed to mean.

When to go: May for the Sudeley Castle gardens at peak bloom, September and October for the beech woods on the Belas Knap walk going golden. Winchcombe is quieter than its neighbours year-round, which is itself a reason to visit.