Donnington Brewery

Donnington is the smaller and the older-looking of the breweries near Stow, a stone watermill set against its own pond with a wheel still turning on the side of it. There has been a mill on the spot since 1291. Beer has been brewed in it since 1865, when Richard Arkell turned the family's flour mill over to the work, and the family has held it down the generations since.

The water does much of the labour. The wheel that once ground corn still drives machinery inside, the same stones and gearing kept in service rather than retired to a museum, and the brewery supplies a small, fixed string of tied pubs across the north Cotswolds and almost no one else.

You cannot, as a rule, simply turn up and tour it. It is a working mill that happens to be beautiful, photographed across its pond by more people than will ever taste what it makes, most of whom never get past the gate.

That suits it. The loveliest things in this country are often the ones held quietly by one family, shown to the road but not opened to it, and Donnington has never seen a reason to change the arrangement.