Playing the first story
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The stories on this route
- Mile 0.0
Broadway Village Green and War Memorial
Stand by the war memorial on the green, the tall, slim stone pillar topped with a cross, and look up the High Street. It's unusually wide, with strips of grass along both sides, and lined with buildings of warm, honey-colored stone. This is Broadway, a village people sometimes call the Jewel of the Cotswolds.
- Mile 0.1
The Lygon Arms
Look for the big stone building near the green, with tall gables and a wing jutting forward at each end. That's the Lygon Arms, said LIG-un. For centuries it was Broadway's great coaching inn: a place where coaches stopped and travelers ate, drank and slept, on the roads linking Wales, Worcester and London.
- Mile 0.2
Broadway Museum and Art Gallery (Tudor House)
Look for the stone house with three gables facing the street and a bay window in the middle, rising through the ground and first floors. Now look at the top of that bay. Two carved shields carry two dates: 1659 and 1660. Very likely those are the years the building was started and finished.
- Mile 0.6
Ridge and Furrow Field
Look across the grass in this field. See the long, parallel humps, one after another, with shallow dips between them? They aren't natural. They're called ridge and furrow, and people made them, with ploughs, centuries ago.
- Mile 1.1
St Eadburgha's Church
Here on Snowshill Road, at the foot of the hill, look for the old church of red sandstone with its tower set in the middle, not at one end. This is St Eadburgha's, the original parish church of Broadway. And it stands almost a mile from the village. So why would a village put its church way out here?
- Mile 1.4
Coneygree Lane
This track climbing the hillside from the gateway opposite St Eadburgha's Church is Coneygree Lane. It looks like a quiet farm track, but its name is a little time capsule. A coney is an old word for a rabbit. And a coneygree, or conegar, was a rabbit enclosure, a place where rabbits were kept and raised.
- Mile 1.8
Cotswold Stone and the Edge
Stop and look back down the hill. The ground falls away steeply toward the flat Vale of Evesham, and at the bottom sits Broadway, a village of honey-colored stone. You're climbing the Cotswold Edge. The Cotswolds are a long range of rolling hills, and both this slope and that color come from the same rock.
- Mile 2.2
Broadway Tower Country Park and The Rookery
This track climbs past the buildings of Rookery Farm and into Broadway Tower Country Park. Look up the slope and you'll see the tower on the skyline. Around it lies an estate of about two hundred acres of parkland, spread over the top of Broadway Hill.
- Mile 2.6
Broadway Tower and The Nuclear Bunker at Broadway Tower
Look up at the tower standing alone at the top of the ridge: six-sided, built of limestone, with round turrets at the corners and battlements along the top, like a small castle. This is Broadway Tower, on Broadway Hill, the second-highest point in the Cotswolds. And here's the thing people come for.
- Mile 2.9
William Morris at Broadway Tower
Look up the hill at Broadway Tower, the little castle on the ridge. In the 1870s it wasn't a museum. It was a holiday home, and one of its guests changed how Britain looks after its old buildings.
- Mile 3.2
The Cotswold Way above Broadway
Below you, the hillside falls away steeply, and at the bottom lies Broadway, its stone houses strung along one wide street. This path is the Cotswold Way, and beside its flight of steps runs a dry-stone wall: a wall built with no mortar at all.
- Mile 3.5
The Cotswold Lion
Look out across these fields above Broadway. If there are sheep grazing, they're part of the business that made these hills rich. Even the name might say so. Many people believe Cotswold means "sheep enclosure in rolling hillsides," though place-name experts prefer a man called Cod and his high open land.
- Mile 4.0
The Broadway Colony
Look along the High Street, lined with honey-colored stone houses. By the 1880s, Broadway had become a quiet backwater: the railway reached Evesham in 1852, and the stagecoaches stopped almost at once. So how did a sleepy Cotswold village end up full of famous Americans? The calm was the draw.
- Mile 4.4
Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
Look around the Green, with its war memorial, its chestnut trees and its honey-colored stone houses. In a garden here in Broadway, at Farnham House, the American painter John Singer Sargent made a painting called Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.
Stories researched October 2026 · every fact checked against a source