Distance: 6.2 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Walk from Chipping Campden along the Cotswolds Way, up onto the Cotswolds escarpment, and along to Worcestershire’s Broadway Hill site of Broadway Tower before descending to Broadway village.

The Story

Route Notes

Getting Back

Weird Happenings at the Peak of Middle England

Broadway Hill is a moderately sized peak standing 310 metres above sea level but it possesses several distinctive traits.

It is situated towards the northern end of the long Cotswolds escarpment, a band of limestone rising prominently from the River Severn plain and striding all the way between Meon Hill situated at the crux where Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire meet and bleed into one and other, and just south of Bath in Somerset. Remarkably its 310 metres makes it the second tallest hill along the ridge, to the east of which lies the upland plateaus of the Cotswolds, one of England’s most hyped and feted landscapes.

The hill is also distinctive for being partly in two counties. The eastern slopes are in Gloucestershire, while the brow of the ridge and the western slopes, running gently down towards the large village of Broadway which shares its name with the hill, are in Worcestershire. This makes Broadway Hill a regional boundary between South West and Midlands England and a rare anomaly of administrative geography where you can walk south from the southern region into the Midlands. 

Broadway Hill’s prominence is enhanced by an early gothic folly, which unusually in this day and age, has been maintained so it retains inhabitable rooms in the centre of it. Constructed in the 1790s by the owner of Croome Park to the north it remains in private hands who charge people a fee to visit the rooms inside and ascend the tower for commanding views across the Cotswolds and out across the Severn Plain, past Bredon Hill to the Malverns and hills of northern Worcestershire, including the Midlands watershed ridge, and beyond. Its standout picturesque location has led to Broadway Tower being adopted simultaneously as a symbol of Worcestershire, the West Midlands region and Cotswolds alike. It is certainly popular with tourists. When I visited in May 2025 dozens of visitors were posing for selfies or striking the classic tourists pose for their friends’ cameras of pretending to be pushing against it or poking their finger on top like a giant. 

Perhaps a tad gruesomely the tower is understood to have been constructed on the site of a triple execution. The executions form part of the so-called “Campden Wonder” a series of bizarre and tragic events which occurred in the small town of Chipping Campden a couple of miles north of Broadway Hill on the other side of the Cotswolds escarpment in the early 1660s.

William Harrison was an elderly genteel landowner living in Chipping Campden. One afternoon in 1660 around the time Charles II was appointed to the British throne reviving the House of Stuart and the monarchy he announced that was going to walk two miles to inspect some of his properties in the nearby village of Ebrington. While he was in his early 70s this was a journey of a kind that Harrison took regularly, and he was expected home that evening.

When Harrison did not return the alarm was raised, and his wife sent a manservant John Perry to search for him. The next morning neither Harrison nor Perry had returned. Edward Harrison, William’s son, then went out to search for both men. He soon came across Perry who said that he was returning from Ebrington where one of Harrison the elder’s tenants advised that he had spent the night. 

The two men continued their search but could not find any trace of William Harrison until they stumbled upon his hat which had been slashed with a sharp implement, along with a shirt and a neckband, also cut and stained with blood. There was however, no sign of a body, whether murdered, or just grievously injured. 

Under questioning after the discovery John Perry announced that he thought that William Harrison had been murdered. This led to Perry being considered a suspect and pressed strongly as to whether he was the murderer or otherwise know who the killer was. At a time when forensic evidence was rudimentary at best, it was very hard to prove who had committed a crime without confessions or wittness’ testimony. During his interrogation John Perry began to claim that his brother Richard and mother Joan had robbed and murder William Harrison, weighted his body, and thrown it into a millpond. Upon their arrest both Richard and Joan denied the murder, and a search of the watercourse turned up no body, but all three were remanded for trial at the next county assizes.

At the assizes the family were tried for robbery and murder under Early Modern conspiracy and joint enterprise laws. The sole evidence against the trio was John’s testimony. During the trial it was established that a week prior to the murder John had lied about being attacked by robbers on the road between Ebrington and Chipping Campden, that Joan and Richard had stolen more than one hundred pounds worth of goods from the Harrison household with John’s connivance in the year prior to their attack on William, that the series of thefts had been instigated by John, although it was Richard and Joan who had carried them out, and that John was a credible witness because there was no reason for him to have lied about any of this.

Purportedly the family was advised by their legal counsel to plead guilty in the face of the evidence presented against them, because the recently passed Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660, which was primarily a truth and reconciliation type measure encompassing combatants in the mid-17th Century Civil Wars, gave them, as people of previously blameless character, a route to a pardon and being spared execution.

However, as proceedings progressed the judge advised that due to no corpse having been recovered he was unwilling to hear the charges of murder. This meant the decision to plead guilty went against the family, as the county authorities decided to try and get a murder conviction at the next assizes session in the spring of 1661, and at this trial, which did go ahead, they were no longer of previously good character due to their previous robbery conviction, so in-eligible for a pardon. 

At this trial all three members of the Perry family opted to plead not guilty. However, despite the lack of a body, this time the trial proceeded and the jury found all three guilty upon the basis of John Perry’s earlier testimony.

Shortly after their conviction the Perry’s were taken to Broadway Hill where a gallows had been erected. It was common practice for robbers who had committed murder in the early modern period to be executed in prominent locations near the site of their crimes. Gibbet Hill on the southern edge of Coventry gets its name for an infamous case of this kind around a century after the events of the Campden Wonder. 

On the day of the execution in line with folk custom Joan Perry was executed first, to see whether she was a witch, and her death would lead to the spell she had cast over her sons being broken. After she was confirmed dead both John and Richard maintained their innocence, and they were then executed simultaneously. 

Which would have marked the end of the sorry tale, until a year later in 1662, a ship from Portugal docked in Dover and William Harrison stepped off. Upon his return to Chipping Campden Harrison relayed a fabulous tale of being seriously wounded and abducted by masked assailants on the road between Ebrington and Chipping Campden. They had then tended his wounds, stuffed his pockets with money, and spirited him hog-tied on horseback to Deal in Kent where he been smuggled onboard a ship bound for the Ottoman Empire. Upon his arrival in Turkey he was sold for a couple of pounds to a Turkish sea captain who spirited him even further east where he was sold again. He then lived for around twenty one months as a slave somewhere in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, before his master died, and his grieving family released him from slavery to return to England.     

It seems doubtful that many people believed this story in 1662 and even fewer have in the centuries since. But there is now no way of knowing where William Harrison actually vanished overseas for a couple of years, why he did so, and what made him come back. One theory advanced by the historian and popular writer Linda Stratmann is that the impending return of the Stuart dynasty made it opportune for him to leave the country for a bit, and it had always been his intention to return. However, without knowing more about Harrison’s political and religious opinions, affiliations, and actions during the tumultuous years of the early and mid-17th Century, it is impossible to know whether this was his motivation.

Either way, Harrison’s bizarre late life disappearing act, has resonated down the centuries, not least because of the way in which it caused three entirely innocent people who just happened to be in close proximity to the disappearance, to be dragged through the Early Modern justice system and ultimately executed. There is undoubtedly something of a dark Jacobean tragedy about the whole affair. So perhaps unsurprisingly in the subsequent decades the story of Harrison’s disappearance, the circumstances around it, and the miscarriage of justice has inspired numerous storytellers. Including in the 20th and 21st Centuries at least three crime novelists two plays by John Masefield (mid-20th Century Britain’s poet laureate and author of The Box of Delights), a BBC Radio Four serial in the 1990s and most recently a heavy metal ballad by the British band Inkubus Sukkubus.

Nor are grim and gruesome weird histories from hundreds of years ago the sole macabre happens at the summit of Broadway Hill. For those who prefer an all to concrete and modern form of doom, there is a rare post-nuclear war monitoring post, established for civil defence purposes in the late 1950s, and in use until 1991, situated just behind Broadway Tower. It is now an attraction like the famous folly which you can pay to have a look around should the fancy take you. Enabling visitors to imagine themselves as a Cold War era district level civil defence officials on doomsday. Their eyesight slowly recovering from the atomic flash, peering down from the Cotswolds escarpment at the fallout engulfed River Severn Plain below you.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

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.

This walk along the Cotswolds escarpment from Chipping Campden to Broadway, along the Cotswolds Way via the summit of Broadway Hill the location of Broadway Tower begins from near the Market Hall in Chipping Campden town centre.

There is a bus stop near to Chipping Campden Market House, which is managed by the National Trust, where you can alight.

The Market House is the official start of the Cotswolds Way National Trail, and you pick up the first waymarker just north of the Market House, climbing a short flight of steps to walk heading left along a quiet road, paralleling the main one through the town centre.

Presently upon reaching the junction beside Saint Catherine’s Chipping Campden’s Roman Catholic church and the Volunteer Arms, turn right walking through the town’s suburbs.

The houses peter out suddenly and you continue steadily uphill along a bridleway track passing through a farmyard.

Having crossed a quiet country road, immediately prior to which on your right, there is a gap in the hedge where you can see the top of the Broadway Tower in the distance, you pick up a well maintained footpath which leads out onto the summit of Dovers Hill at the top of the escarpment.

Turn left walk across the long narrow meadow at the top of Dovers Hill which is managed by the National Trust. To the right there are spectacular views down the slope of the escarpment into Worcestershire and the Severn Plain.

You approach a large beacon lit for significant national occasions, and through a gate into a car park.

At the bottom of the car park’s short access road you turn left through a gateway and across a meadow.

Before crossing the road at the bottom of the field and turning right, picking up a footpath paralleling the main road.

This path is on the other side of the escarpment, with views across the shallow wolds and ridges which comprise the interior of the limestone Cotswold plateau.

At the far side of the field you have been crossing an old stone stile leads you onto a woodland path which soon broadens out into the long, straight meadow that comprises the “Mile Drive”.

Walk straight down mile drive, and cross the stile at the bottom, carrying on along a well trodden path across fields, and over a road.

Soon reaching another bridleway, turn left, heading downhill the short distance to the Fish Hill car park. 

Fish Hill is like Broadway Hill in that by standing at 276 metres above sea level, one of the highest points in the surprisingly diminutive Cotswolds. This is also the place on the walk that you pass from Gloucestershire into Worcestershire and from South West England into the Midlands.

Once in the car park following the Cotswold Way, waymarkers turn right and cross the main road. As you cross you see a sign welcoming you to Gloucestershire almost immediately on your left, an indication of how interwoven the county boundaries are in this part of the country.

On the far side of the road head right picking up a driveway which leads you past a house which stands near the top of the escarpment.

Beyond the house head left into woodland, and then up a slight rise on the other side.

Soon you reach a miniature wold which the path runs straight through. Just after the wold you receive your first glimpse of the Broadway Tower in the near distance.   

Approach the Broadway Tower along the top of the escarpment.

Just before reaching the Tower and the summit of Broadway Hill there is a gateway which leads into the Tower’s privately owned enclosure. You are welcome to enter when the gate is unlocked without paying, but signs advise you to stick to designated paths. You can however, take in the hill’s best views while complying with this instruction, and get a view of the entrance to the hill’s creepy 1950s vintage nuclear bunker (also sometimes accessible for a fee).

Having taken in the views and the hilltop attractions return to the Cotswolds Way and begin to descend Broadway Hill towards Broadway village.

The clearly marked path steadily slopes down across meadows and scrublands, generally populated with sheep, towards the village at the base of the escapement.

At the bottom of Broadway Hill a driveway between two houses leads you from open countryside onto the village’s main street lined with classic yellow stone Cotswold buildings.

Turn right to head into the centre of Broadway. Along the high street there are numerous shops, cafes and pubs. 

There are also several bus stops, including one just beyond the village green, offering bus services to larger places nearby.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

Broadway has several bus services each day run by Stagecoach the major local operator and numerous community transport type routes. At the time of writing in May 2025 there were limited options for viable buses to major settlements with onward connections on weekdays, and fewer on weekends. The 1 and 1A serve the railway stations towns of Stratford-upon-Avon and Moreton-in-Marsh, both offering onward connections by both bus and rail. The northbound buses also serve Chipping Campden. At the time of writing the last bus to Stratford of the day was at 12:54, while the final service to Moreton was at 14:05. There was a later service by a community bus to Cheltenham, which also has numerous onward bus and train connections, departing at 17:39, but few viable options to that town earlier in the day. Checking for current times is advisable prior to setting off.