The Bell at Charlbury
A restored 17th-century pub with rooms and low beams, its kitchen leaning heavily on Daylesford's organic farm produce.
A restored 17th-century pub with rooms and low beams, its kitchen leaning heavily on Daylesford's organic farm produce.
The Bell sits on Church Street in the centre of Charlbury, a handsome market town in the Evenlode valley on the edge of Wychwood Forest, six miles or so north of Witney. The building dates from the 1600s, all honeyed stone and low lintels, and it has been carefully restored as part of the Daylesford Stays collection: the heritage of the old pub kept intact, then softened with the natural materials and hand-finished detail you would expect from a Daylesford place. We think of it as our nearest properly special pub, close enough for a spur-of-the-moment lunch but polished enough to build an evening around.
The kitchen runs a modern British menu rooted in the seasons, with much of the produce coming from Daylesford's organic farm just up the road. It reads as hearty pub cooking done properly rather than anything fussy, and the bar keeps local ales, ciders and a wine list that someone has clearly thought about. On the food side there are two halves to the place: the main dining room for the seasonal menu, and The Barn out the back, built around a wood-fired grill and opening straight onto the garden. That orchard garden is the reason to come in summer, running down toward the stream with fruit trees and long grass, and it is genuinely hard to leave on a warm evening.
The Bell is a pub with rooms rather than just a restaurant, with individually designed bedrooms set above the pub and The Barn, the largest of them tucked into the oldest part of the seventeenth-century building. We rarely need them with the cottage a short drive away, but they are a useful pressure valve when Well Cottage is full and a couple of extra guests want their own bed, or when a wedding or a big night out makes the twenty-minute drive home feel like one too many. Some rooms are dog-friendly too, which matters if you have travelled down with a dog in the boot. Being able to walk upstairs rather than call a taxi is a quiet luxury on the sort of long, unhurried dinner the place seems designed for.
It is about ten miles and a twenty-minute drive from the cottage, mostly along quiet lanes through Great Tew and past the Ditchley estate, which is a pretty run in its own right. Charlbury itself is worth arriving early for: over a hundred listed buildings, an independent food shop and a railway station on the Cotswold Line if anyone fancies leaving the car. If The Bell is booked out, the Killingworth Castle at Wootton and the Chequers at Churchill are both a similar hop from the door, and our full guide to eating and drinking in the area runs from village pubs to farm shops and everything between.
“The orchard garden in summer is hard to leave. Book ahead for dinner, and if The Barn grill is on, that is where I would sit.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.