Sarsden Circuit

Route description

A short easy ride through the Evenlode Valley passing quiet Cotswold border country villages, churches and pubs. A short climb into Churchill.

Highlights

Kingham was voted ‘England’s Favourite Village’ in 2004 by Country Life magazine. The village stands on the Oxfordshire bank of the River Evenlode, a tributary to the Thames. Like many Cotswold villages, Kingham’s history has been well recorded by various historical residents. Most notable perhaps was the Oxford don, William Warde Fowler, who built a house here in 1913. ‘Kingham Old and New’ lovingly accounts village life.

Churchill has a church tower visible for miles, a two-thirds copy of Magdalen College tower in Oxford. The Churchill & Sarsden Heritage Centre contains maps and historical records of the village from 1600 to the present (open 2 – 4.30pm on weekends, April to September). The original Churchill was at the bottom of the hill where only the chancel of its 13th century church remains. Following a fire in 1684, the ‘new’ village developed further up the hill including the church built in 1832. The village was the birthplace in 1769 of William ‘Strata’ Smith, the father of geology and the man who drew the map that changed the world. He became a surveyor and engineer and between 1792 and 1795 he worked on the Somerset Coal Canal. During this time he made a study of the rocks and fossils around Bath and observed ‘a general law that the same strata are found always in the same order or superimposition and contain the same peculiar fossils’.