Hook Norton
A warm ironstone village on the Cotswold fringe with a Victorian tower brewery and some of the best walking in north Oxfordshire.
A warm ironstone village on the Cotswold fringe with a Victorian tower brewery and some of the best walking in north Oxfordshire.
Hook Norton, known to everyone locally as Hooky, is one of those villages that earns its reputation quietly. It is a large, spread-out place built from the local honey-coloured ironstone, with lanes that wind past cottage gardens, old farmyards and St Peter's church, and countryside that rolls away in every direction. We come over from the cottage when we fancy a proper walk followed by a well-kept pint, and it delivers on both counts. The village sits about four and a half miles north-east of Chipping Norton, roughly twenty-five minutes from our door, close enough that it makes an easy afternoon out.
What puts Hooky on the map is the brewery. Hook Norton Brewery has been family-run since 1849, and its Victorian tower building is one of the last of its kind still working in Britain: a tall, gravity-fed cathedral of a place where the grain goes in at the top and the beer comes out at the bottom, much as it always has. Best of all, the brewery still keeps shire horses, and on many days you will see the dray making its rounds delivering barrels to the village pubs, harness jingling, exactly as it did a century ago. It is a genuinely lovely thing to catch, and the sort of detail that makes Hook Norton feel like a place still doing things properly rather than performing them for visitors.
You can walk the tower with a guide, learn how the two flagship ales are made, and visit the little museum stuffed with old brewing kit and village history before landing in the shop and bar to taste the results. The two beers to know are Hooky, the light and eminently drinkable session bitter, and Old Hooky, its darker, stronger, maltier sibling; both turn up in pubs right across the region, and there is real satisfaction in drinking them within sight of where they were brewed. We would always book a tour ahead rather than turn up on spec, as places and times vary through the year. For the full write-up, opening details and how it fits an afternoon, see our guide to the Hook Norton Brewery.
Half the pleasure of Hooky is that its pubs pour the local ales at their freshest, several of them owned by the brewery itself. Here is where we tend to head.
Hook Norton once sat on the Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway, and though the line closed to traffic in 1964 its most striking relic survives: a row of tall stone pillars in the valley to the south-east of the village, all that remains of the old viaducts that once carried trains high above the fields. They loom out of the hedgerows as you follow the footpaths, a handsome piece of Victorian engineering and a fine turning point for a circular walk. The country around Hooky is some of the best in north Oxfordshire for this, gently rolling and threaded with well-marked paths, and the reward at the end is always a pint of something brewed a few hundred yards away. If you want more market-town life to pair with it, nearby Chipping Norton is only a few minutes on, and the classic thatched pub at Great Tew, The Falkland Arms, sits neatly between here and the cottage.
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.