Evesham is a historic market town in southeast Worcestershire, three times the size of Pershore and six miles upriver. It was founded when a Saxon abbey was built at the heart of a particularly sinuous meander on the River Avon, wisely picking the one spot that tends not to flood. A medieval high street followed, an early Parliamentarian died here in battle, and so many historic relics survive that the town feels the need to list them on a swish black and gold sign by the old abbey gate. [Visit Evesham][20 photos]
Best start with the Abbey. It was founded in 702AD by Egwin, Bishop of Worcester, after a swineherd reported seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary within the large meander. Egwin claimed to see it too, thus was either a saint or a bloody good liar, and the tale whereby he miraculously found the key to his shackles in the belly of a fish suggests he was a sneaky conjuror as well. The abbey grew to be one of the largest in England, none of which saved it when Henry VIII made his Dissolution landgrab and very little now remains. The finest remnant is the Evesham Bell Tower, a tall freestanding belfry rebuilt in the 1530s which acted as the belltower for the Abbey and two adjacent churches. It has a peal of ten bells and still chimes the hour in an impressive manner, all the better if you happen to be walking through the passageway underneath at the time.
The grounds of the Abbey have become a large park, central to the town, with a large upper terrace sweeping down to riverside lawns. Abbey Park boasts fine flowerbeds, a lily pool and multiple play areas, also small tiles in the grass marking the footprint of monkish buildings, also the sculpture of a penny-whistle-playing minstrel down by the waterside. The most recent public addition is a Cloister Garden gifted to the town by a local landowner, opened three years ago on the site of the cloister and nave. You walk in through an effigy-edged arch, pass silhouettes of monks and enter a peaceful walled zone that'll look considerably lovelier once the trellises are fully overgrown. I had it all to myself, the half-term crowds keener on skateboarding, seesawing and generally loitering further down.
The other attractive Abbey leftover is the Almonry, the 14th century building from which monks would hand out alms - essentially Evesham's first Foodbank. It survived Henry's demolition order only because it became the personal home of the last Abbot, and looks gorgeously old with its half-timbered walls and Cotswold Stone tiles. The tin roof is only temporary while urgentrestorationworks attempt to get the deteriorating building off the Heritage At Risk list before parts of it fall down or crumble away, an Arts Council grant doing the economic heavy lifting. Alas this also means the town's museum is closed, potentially for at least two years, and the teensy display in the relocated Tourist Information Centre across the road is scant recompense. It continues my unfortunate run of visiting farflung market towns while their museums are under renovation, and I had to make do with a swift look at the medieval stocks in the garden out front instead.
An even older structure is Reginald's Gateway, Reginald being Evesham's Abbot in the early 13th century, although the attractive timber building across the top is 'only' Tudor. The gateway leads from All Saints' Church towards the Market Square via the most characterful half-timbered alleyway in town. This contains the entirely unexpected Ye Olde Baked Potato Shoppe which looks like it's been piling coleslaw on melted butter since Elizabethan times. A sign above confirms it's occupied by "Evesham's Original Spud Man, est 1989" (so more Liz II than Liz I), but in fact the impressively basic eatery only moved here in 2023 (so is really more Charles III). Imagine if anywhere in London sold a baked potato topped with roast pork, stuffing, apple and crackling for £3.80, and then pray poncy metropolitan chains never expand to smother provincial cuisine.
Evesham's retail offering is holding up along the main streets but also shows signs of significant decline. I turned up on market day but found Market Square empty and a paltry few stalls in the high street, which isn't what James I's charter intended. The half-timbered RoundHouse is the oldest bank building in the UK, but is currently absolutely smothered in scaffolding before Nat West abandon the town for good. What with Santander also closing down in April that'll just leave Lloyd's and Nationwide or a 15 mile drive to Cheltenham. As for the extremely-80s Riverside Centre, it's easily one of the most depressing shopping malls I've ever visited, so much so I had to walk through it twice. Less than five of its 40 units are still trading, the food court leaks and the walkways are blighted with broken glass and unswept litter. The council's imminent intention is to redevelop the site into a "mixed-use residential, leisure and retail development" and I hope they find somewhere to hang the town's quirky Millennium Clock, currently languishing up a vacant arm.
Across the river is the separate settlement of Bengeworth, originally outside the Abbey's influence and joined to Evesham via an 8-arch medieval bridge. That was so narrow a woman got crushed by a passing cart in 1850, leading to its replacement by the current Workman Bridge (named after the Mayor at the time, not the construction team). From its balustrade I looked down across the wider-than-normal Avon overspilling into the riverside gardens and tried to imagine how much worse it must have been when the adjacent shops got flooded in 2007 and several caravans got jammed in the bridge's arches. I had been intending to walk two miles of riverside promenade but decided against, the paths intermittently overwashed by brown water and the watermeadows more water than meadow in several places.
But I did make it to the end of Boat Lane where an 800 year-old ferry still crosses the Avon. Its original purpose was to allow monks to reach their vineyards on the western bank, then later it became the swiftest method to reach the village of Hampton. These days the Hampton Ferry is an archaic service manually operated by pulling on a cable suspended across the river, although all I saw above the waterline was the winch. It's also seasonal so there's no chance of crossing again until the spring, although the operator's restaurant still opens daily should you fancy a hot beverage, a plant-based fishless finger baguette or 'Something on Toast'. I was surprised to see a large estate of 200 new houses under construction on adjacent meadow, hopefully above the flood level, and intrigued that part of the long term plan is to add a proper footbridge slightly upriver which'd probably kill off the ferry for good.
The town's chief contribution to British history is as the site of the Battle ofEvesham in 1265. Henry III had been captured by his barons the previous year and England was now ruled by a gathering of nobles under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, effectively our very first Parliament. When Prince Edward escaped his clutches a royalist army duly marched to meet de Montfort's troops at Evesham and on 4th August battle was joined on a hillside a mile to the north of the town. You get there by walking up the high street, continuing past the station and on up a suburban incline to where the big houses are. A barely-marked path then leads out into open countryside on the brow of the slope, this the site of the decisive skirmish which became inevitable when Simon's reinforcements failed to arrive.
Here at what's now known as Battlewell, de Montfort was first unhorsed, then hacked to death and dismembered. The royalist army showed no mercy to any of his troops, nor to the townspeople who'd sheltered him and it's said the Abbey ran with blood. Most of the battlefield remains undeveloped although at present you're only allowed to follow a permissive path down to the edge of a muddy field, the commemorative obelisk concealed by trees. I yomped through untroubled by any other visitors, the sounds of slaughter replaced by occasional birdsong, eventually emerging with far muddier boots on the main road by the out-of-town Tesco. Prince Edward later became Edward I and decided it would be wise to summon Parliament as a permanent institution, thereby establishing representative government and the earliest seeds of democracy.
Meanwhile Simon de Montfort was buried in Evesham Abbey and although that's long gone his burial site is still marked by a memorial in Abbey Gardens, his goal of a constitutional monarchy ultimately met. Not bad for a small Cotswold market town 90 miles from Westminster.
