Thyme

Thyme

The Cotswolds is one of those places that has been loved a little too publicly for its own good, which makes the quieter eastern edge, where the landscape flattens toward the Thames and the village names get harder to pronounce, worth knowing about. Thyme is in the village of Southrop, near Lechlade, where the tourist density drops accordingly. Caryn Hibbert bought Southrop Manor two decades ago and spent years restoring the 17th-century stone buildings, opening a cookery school first and building outward from there. The result is 31 rooms spread across a 150-acre estate, a collection of farmhouses, cottages, and barns connected by gravel paths, with wildflower meadows, a kitchen garden, rare-breed sheep, and the River Leach running through the grounds. The rooms vary considerably in size and character, from smaller cottage rooms with original beams and rolltop baths to freestanding cottages with wood-burning stoves and private gardens. The Ox Barn, the flagship restaurant, is in a lovingly restored agricultural barn with full-height ceilings and a lattice of original beams overhead; Charlie Hibbert, Caryn's son, runs the kitchen with a menu built around what the estate's two-acre kitchen garden and farm produce that week. The Swan in the village is the more casual option, good for lunch. The Baa Bar, once the lambing sheds, is residents only and correctly so. The Meadow Spa, the Orchid House pool, the cookery school, and a calendar of events running from floristry to cocktail-making fill out a property that functions more as a destination than a hotel. This is a hotel that has genuinely been thought through by people who live next door to it, which shows. It is over-12s only in most of the accommodation, dogs are welcome in the cottage suites, and the whole operation has the particular warmth of something run by a family that is invested in it personally. Kelmscott Manor, William Morris's country house, is twenty minutes by car. The Cirencester market runs on Fridays. Both are worth doing and neither is the reason for coming. The short version: Thirty-one rooms across a restored 17th-century estate in the Cotswold village of Southrop, with a restaurant in a former ox barn, a cookery school, a kitchen garden, rare-breed sheep, and a family running it who live next door.