Illustration — photo coming soon
Just a short walk from Cheltenham, Staverton is a village that rewards a leisurely afternoon's wandering if you're interested in what the landscape can tell you about the past.
There are two things here that really capture the imagination.
The most unusual is an Ice House, which survives as an earthwork rather than as a building you can enter. It's essentially a substantial mound in the field, marking where the brick chamber lies buried beneath. When grand estates like the nearby Staverton Court needed to keep ice through the year for their kitchens and tables, this ingenious structure did the job—an early form of refrigeration that shows just how much effort went into maintaining such comforts. The scale of the mound alone gives you a sense of the engineering involved.
Nearby, you'll also notice traces of Staverton's medieval past. The Staverton Court manor house itself remains a private residence, but the landscape around it tells its older story, with evidence of a moated site that once served as a defensive feature. It's the kind of place where you can really picture how the estate evolved over centuries, and there are accessible public footpaths in the area for a gentle stroll through the countryside.
Cheltenham is just minutes away if you fancy a proper town afterwards, or you could push on towards Gloucester for more historical exploration.
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