Your Guide to a Cotswolds Summer

There is a particular kind of summer weekend that stays with you. The sort where you leave your phone face-down, eat something cooked with real care, sleep in a bed you’re reluctant to leave in the morning and wake up with no particular agenda. The Cotswolds does this well, if you know where to go.

This is not a roundup of every honeypot village and cream tea stop in the region. It’s a practical guide to making a summer trip here worth the drive: where to base yourself, what to do once you arrive and where to eat and drink when the day is done. Two of our favourite places to be in summer are (not surprisingly) The Wild Duck in Ewen, Gloucestershire and The Double Red Duke in Clanfield, Oxfordshire, and they feature throughout, but the reasons to come here are bigger than either of them.

The Walking is Genuinely Excellent

The Cotswold Way runs 102 miles from Chipping Campden to Bath and passes through some of the most quietly beautiful countryside in England. In summer the footpaths are dry and the views go on for miles. You do not need to be a serious walker to enjoy any of it. Shorter circular routes around the Thames Path and the Ewen valleys, in the flat Gloucestershire countryside just south of Cirencester, take an hour or two and require nothing more than decent shoes. The payoff at the end is considerable: a proper pint at a pub that has been expecting you.

Cirencester is Worth Half a Day

Five minutes from The Wild Duck, Cirencester is the largest town in the Cotswolds and a proper market town rather than a tourist one. The Roman amphitheatre, the wool church of St John the Baptist and the Corinium Museum, one of the best Roman archaeology collections in the country, give you something to think about. The market runs on Mondays and Fridays. The coffee is good and the streets are largely uncrowded, even in July.

Bibury Has the Famous Photograph, but It Also Has a Good Walk

Arlington Row in Bilbury is one of the most photographed streets in England and yes, it is exactly as pretty in person as it looks. Go early or on a weekday. The stretch of the Coln Valley around it repays a slow wander, and the trout farm next door has been there since 1902

The Cotswold Wildlife Park is Brilliant

Just outside Burford, a historic wool town on the Oxfordshire edge of the Cotswolds is the Cotswold Wildlife Park. It sits in the grounds of a Victorian manor house and is one of those places that works well for adults as it does for children, particularly if you have time for watching white rhinos move slowly through a field. In summer the gardens are in full colour. It is about twenty minutes from The Double Red Duke.

Burford Is the Best Market Town in the Region

Burford’s high street is one of the most handsome market towns in Oxfordshire. It runs steeply downhill to an old stone bridge and packs in more independent shops, antique dealers and bakeries per square metre than almost anywhere else in the Cotswolds. The church at the bottom has a Norman doorway and a story about Levellers imprisoned in 1649 that most people walk straight past. Allow a couple of hours and a willingness to spend money you had not planned to spend.

Oxford Is 30 Minutes Away

One of The Double Red Duke’s quieter selling points is how close it sits to Oxford. A museum, a river punt, and a personable bookshop. The city is a straight drive up the A4095 from Clanfield and works well as a day trip.

The Pub Gardens Come Into Their Own in Summer

Cotswolds pubs were built for summer evenings. Both The Wild Duck in Ewen and The Double Red Duke in Clanfield have outside space that earns its reputation when the days become long and the evenings stay light. At The Wild Duck the garden has a summer bar and lots of tables. At The Double Red Duke the res and white stripe parasol filled garden is a well known local beauty spot and fills up early on warm evenings. Neither requires a booking for a drink.

Both pubs also run a full programme of summer events and activities worth planning around.

The Food Is the Reason to Come Back

Both kitchens work with suppliers they know by name. At The Double Red Duke, open-fire cooking gives the menu a depth that shows up in aged beef and whole fish. At The Wild Duck, the seasonal menu follows what is good: in summer that means garden vegetables, lighter sauces and the kind of fish dish that justifies the drive no matter how far you’re coming from. Sunday lunch at either pub is worth building a weekend around.

Nineteen Bedrooms. None Quite the Same.

Neither pub feels like a hotel in the usual sense. At The Wild Duck, rooms were put together with antiques, original features and limewash walls in a palette that drawn from the landscape outside. A handful of rooms open onto private terraces. At The Double Red Duke, roll-top baths and 100 Acres toiletries make the rooms difficult to leave in the morning. Both have some rooms that are dog-friendly, which resolves a logistical problem many Cotswolds visitors quietly dread.

It Works Just as Well for a Local Night Out

Neither pub is only for visitors. Both have regulars who come in on a Tuesday because the cooking is worth it. If you live within half an hour of Cirencester or Oxford and have not yet tried either, summer is a reasonable excuse. The bar at The Wild Duck is the kind of place where you can sit at the counter with a glass of wine and feel entirely at ease. The Double Red Duke’s garden on a Friday evening in July is, in the most unpretentious sense of the word, a lovely place to be.

How to Plan Your Visit

The Wild Duck sits in the village of Ewen, just outside Cirencester. The Double Red Duke is in Clanfield, around twenty-five minutes from Oxford. We take table bookings on the website and rooms go quickly all year round and especially in the summer. You’ll need a couple of months notice for a July or August weekend but do remember us for a mid week stay as we always have more availability. Plenty of spaces to make those work calls if need be.

Both also offer spa treatments if you want to build a proper slow weekend around them. The Shepherd’s Hut treatment room at The Double Red Duke is the kind of addition that tips a good trip into a genuinely restorative one.

The Cotswolds rewards people who do not try too hard with it. Come for the walk, stay for the food, book a room and see how the morning goes.