Sarah Shuckburgh visits the parsonage, now a hotel, where a famous journal was written.

I have come to Upper Slaughter with a long-dead country clergyman as my guide and host. . . or rather, with my well-thumbed copy of The Diary of a Cotswold Parson, out of print for years, but republished on February 27. Reverend F E Witts wrote his journal almost 200 years ago, but today little has changed in his beautiful village.

The name Slaughter - or Sclostre in the Domesday Book - means "a muddy place", and the Slaughter Brook still meanders past the Norman church and between 300-year-old cottages of honey-coloured stone. On the site of a
house once owned by Henry VIII stands the 17th-century manor where Reverend Witts lived - and where I am staying
for the weekend.

The rectory is now a comfortable hotel, called Lords of the Manor, but I can easily pretend that I'm here as the Reverend's guest, as every room is full of family paintings, books and furniture. In the hall, I shrink under the icy stare of the Rector's favourite aunt, Apphia, Lady Lyttleton, whose stern portrait hangs above the heads of the smiling receptionists. Her Ladyship's finger points to an improving passage in her Bible.

My bedroom - with its antique four-poster bed and free-standing cast-iron bath - is named after Ferdinando Tracy Travell, rector and owner of the manor from 1763. His portrait hangs downstairs, and his coat of arms is carved above the drawing-room fireplace. When Tracy Travell died in 1808, his nephew, Francis Edward Witts, newly-married and already a keen diarist, became rector, and remained here until his death in 1854.

Reverend Witts apparently spoke little to his wife and instead confided all his thoughts to his diaries. His prose does not have the grace of Kilvert, a later, better-known parson diarist, but his observations are shrewd and witty. He comments on national news - the Enclosures, the Reform Bill, and "the imputed adulteries and gross indecencies of Queen Caroline" - and on local events - the completion of the Berkeley canal, the arrival of "tram carts which travel by steam" and the grand opening of the Moreton-in-Marsh railway.

He complains of the "tardy civility" of an ancient widow who waits 18 years before paying him a visit, the suicide of a parishioner ("the want of sound religious principle no doubt brought on temporary insanity"), and a quarrel in the rectory kitchen which leads to the dismissal of most of his domestics. We read about his visits to lunatic asylums, to the wool fair, and to the Three Choirs Festival - inaugurated in 1715, and still running today.

Witts's hectic round of social engagements and public duties involves long journeys on his horse, through countryside that he adores, and which is as pretty now as it must have been then. The Warden's Way footpath, for example, passes the manor, and there are wonderful walks in all directions. Half a mile downstream is the enchanting village of Lower Slaughter, with its mill wheel still turning. A mile upstream is the hamlet of Eyford, where Milton is said to have written parts of Paradise Lost. The lovely market town of Stow-on-the-Wold is three miles away.

The Reverend "enjoyed a refreshing dish of tea" when he got home from his exertions and, after my bracing walk, I too take tea by the fire, as I gaze through the mullioned windows on to the park, and dip into the diaries again. Francis Edward Witts - the diarist's great-great-grandson - sold the manor in 1985, but still lives in the village.

Reverend Witts's rectory is the only hotel in Gloucestershire with a Michelin star (reawarded last month for the eighth consecutive year). The Reverend would doubtless be pleased to see his rectory as it is today, and to enjoy its still unspoilt Cotswold setting.

'The Diary of a Cotswold Parson' (£7.99, Sutton).
Lords of the Manor Hotel (01451 820243; www.lordsofthemanor.com), doubles from £149.

First published by the Telegraph
©SarahShuckburgh