Is This The Perfect Village?

Chris Smith visits charming Ilmington, which earned a place in the Sunday Times’ Best Places to Live guide.

- Chris Smith

As you stroll around the village of Ilmington you get the feeling that not much has changed in this corner of the Cotswolds over the years.

It has clung tightly to its idyllic charm, and it’s easy to see why this once self-sufficient farming community has become so sought after, earning a place in this year’s Sunday Times’ prestigious Best Places to Live guide, and just two years ago being shortlisted in Channel 4’s Village of the Year competition.

Sitting at an important crossroads at the northern gateway to the Cotswolds Area of Natural Beauty and the southern gateway to Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon Avon, and at the foot of the highest peak in the county of Warwickshire, Ilmington is a place of considerable architectural and historic interest.

The village was originally an Anglo-Saxon farming settlement, and is recorded in the Domesday Survey of 1086 as having a manor with three ploughs and a church with a priest. The title of Lord of the Manor has passed through many hands, including those of the famous de Montfort family.

Today it is home to around 800 people, with a patchwork of homes that includes grand properties and chocolate box cottages, some still with their thatches, as well as modern, functional homes, most of which are made from ironstone or Cotswold stone quarried from the surrounding hills, and all are connected by a network of picturesque narrow footpaths that criss-cross their way across the village. Even the road names have a certain quirkiness with Front Street, Back Street, Middle Street, Grump Street, and Frog Lane among them.