PINTS, PLOUGHING… AND A PEAKY-BUSHES SURPRISE! Clarkson’s pub gets an eyeful as The Farmer’s Dog meets its most eyebrow-raising local tradition
If Jeremy Clarkson thought opening a pub in the Cotswolds would simply mean pulling pints, serving pies and moaning about red tape, he clearly hadn’t read the small print on the hedgerows. Because in the latest dose of very Clarkson chaos, the TV farmer found himself confronting the sort of countryside “amenity” that never appears on a glossy tourist brochure: reports that land near his Oxfordshire pub had been used as a dogging spot for local swingers. According to widely reported comments from Clarkson and clips released around Clarkson’s Farm, the discovery came complete with discarded underwear and the sort of stunned expression only Clarkson can produce when the British countryside behaves in an extremely British, and extremely awkward, fashion.
And honestly, could there be a more Clarkson plotline if it were hand-written by the gods of tabloid television? One minute he’s trying to build a rural empire of beer, beef and bravado; the next, he’s apparently discovering that not every customer attraction in the vicinity can be listed on the official website. It is the perfect collision of his new life as a champion of the countryside with the countryside’s age-old habit of being gloriously, hilariously impossible to manage.
The pub at the centre of the commotion is The Farmer’s Dog, Clarkson’s now-famous hostelry at Asthall Barrow near Burford. Officially, it pitches itself as far more than just a boozer: a full-on day out with a restaurant, bar, butcher and bottle shop, and even extra facilities in the old Grand Tour tent. The pub’s whole schtick is aggressively, proudly British produce, with Clarkson saying he has tried to make sure everything there is grown or reared by British farmers, right down to the drinks and the food on the menu. In other words, it is less “quiet pint in the corner” and more “flag-waving cathedral to local farming with gravy.”
From Top Gear to Diddly Squat
That all fits neatly with the broader Clarkson rebrand. For years he was the loud man in fast cars; now he is also the loud man in muddy boots, thundering about crop prices, weather, planning battles and the terrifying economics of running anything involving the public. Diddly Squat Farm, his Cotswolds farming operation, became the engine of that second act, and the farm shop says it was established in 2020. Since then, Diddly Squat has turned into a sort of agricultural theme park for fans: part working farm, part farm shop, part national shrine to the sentence, “How hard can it be?” before everything goes wrong.
And because one impossible business apparently wasn’t enough, along came booze. Hawkstone, the drinks brand linked to Clarkson and Cotswold Brew Co, launched in 2021 and sells premium lager and cider, with the company saying the barley comes from his farming venture. The brand has become one of the neatest examples of the Clarkson machine in action: grow the barley, put it in the show, put the show audience in the pub, put the pub drinkers onto the lager, and then tell everyone it is all much harder than it looks. It is vertical integration by way of sarcasm, tractors and very expensive pints.
Inside The Farmer’s Dog
The Farmer’s Dog itself is also part of a makeover story. The site was previously known as The Windmill before Clarkson bought and reinvented it, reopening it in 2024 under its new name. The official pub site now lists long opening hours and presents the place as a destination rather than a simple roadside stop. Which makes the whole “surprise countryside rendezvous zone nearby” revelation even more deliciously on-brand for modern celebrity Britain: you spend millions turning a pub into an artisanal rural attraction, only for the local folklore to barge in wearing absolutely nothing from the gift shop.
Of course, this is why Clarkson remains such irresistible tabloid material. Plenty of celebrities buy posh country retreats and disappear behind gates. Clarkson buys a farm, turns every setback into television, opens a pub, launches a beer brand, and somehow ends up in headlines involving both agricultural supply chains and hedge-based hanky-panky. Whether he is battling councils, weather, restaurant logistics or the more adventurous uses of a pub car park, he has a gift for making rural administration look like a contact sport.
Only in Clarkson Country
The real magic of the story, though, is that it says everything about the Clarkson universe in one daft little bundle. The farm is real, the pub is real, the brewery is real, the British-food mission is real — and yet all of it exists inside a rolling cloud of mishap, self-promotion and comic disbelief. You do not merely visit Clarkson’s world; you seem to stumble into an ongoing farce where the sausages are local, the lager is branded, the queues are long, and somewhere in the shrubbery there may be a subplot nobody put in the business plan.
So raise a glass of Hawkstone to the latest chapter in Clarkson country: a place where the fields grow barley, the farm shop sells the dream, the pub serves the produce, and the neighbouring bushes, apparently, can generate headlines all by themselves. For Jeremy Clarkson, it is just another day in the empire: half farm, half farce, and fully capable of producing the most gloriously British sentence of the year — “There’s been a bit of trouble near the pub.” Only in the Cotswolds. Only with Clarkson.