Cotswold WayPlanning2 min read
Water and lunch on the Cotswold Way, mile by mile
A village most nights and a shop most days, except along the escarpment above Cheltenham, and a last thirty miles with no tap on the map. Here is where they are.
By Tom Spencer ·
The Cotswold Way drops into a village most evenings, and villages have shops and pubs. For most of the walk, lunch is not something to plan. There are two exceptions, and both are worth knowing before you set off.
Everything below is counted from OpenStreetMap: every food shop, café and pub within a kilometre of the path, read 25 September 2026, and every drinking-water tap within 400 metres, read 19 September. A place on the map is not a promise it is open, and anything further than a kilometre off the path is not counted.
- Food shops within 1 km
- 104
- with 175 cafés and 90 pubs
- Longest stretch without one
- 18 mi
- 28.3 km, Charlton Kings to Painswick
- Longest stretch without a tap
- 31 mi
- 50.5 km, Wotton-under-Edge to Bath
Above Cheltenham
The one long stretch without a food shop is the escarpment above Cheltenham, from Charlton Kings to Painswick: 28.3 kilometres, from mile 29 to mile 47. The town is always below you there, and the trail keeps to the top.
In the planner's seven-day split, that is day 3, Charlton Kings to Painswick Beacon. Both of the day's food shops are at the start, in Charlton Kings, and there is nothing after them for sixteen miles. Two cafés and three pubs are within a kilometre of the path along the way. The longest stretch with no shop, café or pub at all is 13.3 kilometres, from Charlton Kings to Crickley Hill.
Every other day of the seven has a food shop somewhere along it, and most have several.
Water: the last thirty miles
OpenStreetMap has seventeen drinking-water taps within 400 metres of the Way, nine of them on the path itself. The longest gap between two is the last one: from Wotton-under-Edge, at mile 71, to Bath, at mile 102, the map has no tap at all.
That stretch is not dry country. It passes through Hawkesbury Upton, Old Sodbury, Tormarton and Cold Ashton, and the map has pubs and shops in several of them. But the water there is in the villages, not beside the path: fill up where you stop, and carry enough for the stretches between.
The next longest gap between taps is 38.7 kilometres, from Winchcombe to Overtown, over Cleeve Common and along the edge above Cheltenham. Fill up in Winchcombe.
Build your walkCotswold Way in 7 days103 mi · about 15 miles a dayOpen the planner →Now make it yours.
The planner splits the Cotswold Way into days that fit the time you have, with the trains at each end. Free, no account.
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