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The hotel: the village pub that chooses to call itself the Village Pub can only be run by wonderful, postmodern ironists or morons. I went to find out which.

The idea is that it’s the little satellite of Cotswolds-trendy Barnsley House, 100 yards up the road. So you can stay for as little as £95 per night, but still nip up the road for some top-notch touch-up in the spa at the hotel (where rooms start at nearly £300 a night).

When we arrived at 5pm, the lights were out and there was definitely nobody at home. I peered through the window and saw the restaurant’s bookings diary without our names in for that evening. So, on first approach, things were tending towards the “managed by morons” theory.

Back up the road at the hotel, it turned out that the pub doesn’t open its doors until 6pm, but somebody would come down and let us in.

When they did, I was relieved to see that the Village Pub has full postmodern attitude. There are nooks, there are crannies and the bar has low-slung beams and rustic benches to sit at; but, on closer inspection, the beams are artful and dusted, the benches bespoke-designed to fit snugly into the nooks.

The rooms: the Village Pub has seven rooms. And lashings more irony. There’s wallpaper, but not the Anaglypta of the unenlightened and unironic English B&B. Oh, no – this is deeply coloured, with curlicues and blobs. My room, No 6, had yards of damask swaggering off a (mini) four-poster bed and, instead of whistling windows, double glazing, to keep out the wind and rain of a British summer. There was also one of those little black portable televisions now found only in granny care homes and dull B&Bs. Not at all ironic.

The bathroom was manorial in attitude, if not in size: a claw-footed bath with a trompe-l’oeil marble effect and a farmhouse-style spindle-backed chair, on which your spouse can sit and read out extracts from the property section of old Country Life magazines while you soak.

The food: irony depends on your knowing that I know that you know that I know. If you know what I mean. The pioneer village gastropubs got it right, with self-aware combinations of traditional foods, wittily updated. Now it seems you know before you walk into a country pub that there’ll be some tired sausages lying on mash, a chunk of beer-battered (it’s a pub, geddit?) cod and pudding soaked in nostalgia.

Bob Parker’s menu for the Village Pub menu is intelligent and different. And the cooking is good. When we were there, there was a soup combining onion and cider, and a crisp-skinned, succulent fillet of bream with shallot, fennel and some sprightly blood orange. A rice pudding was saved from indolent nostalgia by the addition of pineapple. And it was good to see that deep-fried squid with sweet chilli sauce has done so well for itself in London, it’s decided to move to the country.

What to do? The Village Pub is set among the green, rolling smells of Gloucestershire, and you’re in the middle of some of England’s finest walking country. So why not go out and skip through the fields, kick the heads off some old daffodils, run away from cows that may be bulls after all, because they’ve got horns, and splash through muddy puddles up to your middles?

Afterwards, the pub’s mother ship, Barnsley House, has one of those modernist, minimalist spas with lots of square-cut paving butting up to glass and steel and old hand-hewn stones. There are subterranean massage rooms; and, after your massage, you can float soothingly in the outdoor hydrotherapy pool, heated to 36C, while looking up at the bright-blue/gunmetal-grey skies until eight at night.

Tetbury is about 20 minutes away by car. This is one of the best places to look for antiques, and the Prince of Wales, perhaps our future King of Unironic Premodernism, has just opened a shop there too. Although he probably won’t be working behind the counter. Noooo.

The Village Pub is in Barnsley, near Cirencester, Gloucestershire; 01285 740421, www.thevillagepub.co.uk

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