Charlbury is one of those small Cotswold towns that punches well above its weight, and The Bell is a big part of why. A 17th-century coaching inn with low beams, proper ales and a kitchen that leans heavily on Daylesford's farm produce, it manages to feel both rooted and quietly ambitious.
The Bell sits on Church Street in the centre of Charlbury, a handsome market town on the western edge of the Evenlode valley. The building dates from the 1600s, all honeyed stone and sagging lintels, and the interior has been left alone in all the right ways: flagstone floors, a wood-burning stove, settles worn smooth by a few centuries of elbows. The food, though, is anything but old-fashioned. The kitchen works closely with Daylesford (the organic farm is barely five miles away), so the menu shifts with the seasons and tends toward clean, unfussy British cooking: slow-roasted pork belly with heritage apple, chalk-stream trout, greens picked that morning. There's a short wine list that someone has clearly thought about, and the cask ales are well kept.
In winter the two dining rooms fill with firelight and the smell of roasting meat; in summer the tables spill out into an orchard garden at the back, which is genuinely lovely, all long grass and fruit trees with the churchyard wall beyond. It's about a twenty-minute drive from the cottage, mostly along quiet lanes through Great Tew and past the Ditchley estate. Worth booking for dinner, especially at weekends, though lunch is usually easier to walk into.
“The orchard garden in summer is hard to leave. Order the pork belly if it's on, and don't skip the local ales.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.