Distance: 8 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps
Walk between the villages of Honeybourne and Ilmington on the north western most fringes of the Cotswolds National Landscape. The walk is mostly rural and passes through three counties, going up and over Ebrington Hill the highest peak in Warwickshire.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
Midland’s Postcode, Southern Feel
There is a little pocket of the Midlands counties of Warwickshire and Worcestershire that lies in the Cotswolds National Landscape.
A pastoral limestone upland area with a deep purchase upon the English imagination (for better and for worse…) that in the 21st Century is generally considered to be an integral part of England’s southern regions.
Unsurprisingly, this border country where the Midlands merges with the South West is where the relatively gently hilly county of Warwickshire’s highest peak is located.
Ebrington Hill (261 metres above sea level) forms part of the cliff-like escarpment that marks the edge of the Cotswolds. The western slope of the hill is in Gloucestershire, placing it just outside the Midlands, however, the hill’s tallest point near a small radio transmission station is in Warwickshire.
Historically the summit of Ebrington Hill lay just in Gloucestershire, meaning that Warwickshire’s county top used to be a promontory just east of the highest point. However, recent finicking of the administrative boundary means that the very top of the hill 261 metres above sea level now lies in Warwickshire.
As county tops go, even in the Midlands, 261 metres above sea level is not especially high. It’s roughly in line with what’s usual for counties in the more southerly reaches of England.
However, given how much higher Ebrington Hill is relative to the flat lands of the Avon, Stour and Severn plains beneath it. This means that from the top of the hill there are majestic views out west towards the higher land of western Worcestershire and Herefordshire, north across the flatter ground of central Worcesterhsire and Warwickshire, and south and east into the heart of the Cotswolds National Landscape.
It is a deeply rural area, despite the development of numerous new housing estates on the edge of the villages fringing the Cotswolds. On the Gloucestershire side there are the Cotswolds gateway villages of Ebrington and Mickleton. While on the Warwickshire side there lies Ilmington, a Midlands village, the highest settlement in the county where it is situated, that forever feels like a small slice of the English south. Fittingly the village’s two pubs are divided between a Hook Norton brewery hostelry and one which mostly sells Purity beers.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
Getting Back
Ilmington is not especially well served by buses (it has never had a railway station). But in March 2023 when I walked the route it was not terribly served either, at least on weekdays. The village is served by four or five buses a day between Stratford-upon-Avon and Morton-in-Marsh, both of which have railway stations: Stratford-upon-Avon north towards Birmingham and Banbury and Morton-in-Marsh towards Worcester and Hereford and Oxford and London. There are also two or three buses, the 75A between Banbury and Stratford-upon-Avon via Shipston-upon-Stour, run by Stagecoach which also serve the village. The other bus services are less frequent and run at a bad time of day for walkers, departing too early to be much use for getting back from the village.