Winchcombe is a small stone-built town on the northern edge of the Cotswolds, 10 km north-east of Cheltenham, and was once far more important than it looks: in the 8th and 9th centuries it was a royal centre of the kingdom of Mercia, and Winchcombe Abbey, founded around 798 by King Coenwulf, was one of the great Benedictine houses of the Midlands until its dissolution in 1539, after which it vanished almost without trace. The parish church of St Peter, built in the 1460s and known for its grotesque gargoyles, and the medieval George Inn pilgrims’ hostel are what remain of the abbey town.
Sudeley Castle stands in its park on the south-eastern edge of the town. Rebuilt in the 1440s by Ralph Boteler, Baron Sudeley, it passed to the crown and to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III, who built the great banqueting hall whose ruins remain. Katherine Parr, the sixth and surviving wife of Henry VIII, lived here with her last husband Thomas Seymour, died in 1548 after childbirth and is buried in the castle’s St Mary’s chapel, the only English queen buried in a private house. Elizabeth I was entertained here for three days in 1592. Slighted by Parliament after the Civil War in 1649, the castle lay ruined until the Dent brothers, glove-makers from Worcester, bought it in 1837 and began the restoration continued by the Dent-Brocklehurst family, who still own and live in it.
Hailes Abbey, a Cistercian house of 1246 whose relic of the Holy Blood drew medieval pilgrims, is 3 km away, and the Neolithic long barrow of Belas Knap sits on the hill above the town. The Cotswold Way passes through; the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway stops at Winchcombe, and Cheltenham Spa is the nearest mainline station.
