10 BEST PLACES TO STAY IN OXFORDSHIRE

Adrian Mourby

Back to Inspirations
I am very grateful to live in Oxfordshire. It’s a county that has managed to keep so many of its distinctive old pubs and hotels going. Many hotels still look out on to the town’s market square and so many pubs on to the village green. I like the little drinking parlours you find in country inns with their uneven floors and working fireplaces. I love the dogs lapping from water dishes in the bar, and the sloping, low-beamed bedrooms.
Oxfordshire also has some characterful hotels, including probably the best prison conversion in Britain. Sometimes the place you stay in is just a means to an end, a way to get away for the weekend. Here however are ten Oxfordshire places that will be an integral part of your holiday.

Malmaison Oxford, Oxford

MALMAISON OXFORD

Prisons converted into hotels were a big idea in the early 2000s. Helsinki has one, as does Bodmin in Cornwall and Boston in Massachusetts.  These sturdy Victorian buildings can offer masses of rooms down clearly-delineated corridors and can tell a lot of stories. Oxford’s Malmaison is one of the best conversions because long before it was a prison it was a moated castle dating back to Norman times. Some of those castle walls are still visible. When it was refurbished as a “modern” prison in 1786, it was in the then-fashionable castellated style with arrow slits for windows and a faux portcullis over the entrance.
In 1996 the prison was deemed too expensive to modernise and it closed. Initially the property was used as a film set. Ronnie Barker was an inmate here in Porridge and inevitably it featured (like the rest of Oxford) in Inspector Morse but also in The Bill and Endeavour.

Most of the modern bedrooms were composed of three old cells, with two knocked together into a double bedroom and the ensuite in the third. Carpets were specially woven in prison grey with clusters of white tally marks counting down the release date. There is humour too in the occasional poster (Jailhouse Rock, The Italian Job &c). The current manager, Padraic Flavin has lifted the institutional feel of these big long corridors with their heavy cell doors by putting purple ceiling lights up in the coving above the three flights of cells. He’s also softened the palette in the basement dining room, making it more floral and less punitive.
Sadly the Visitor’s Room, which was once my favourite bar in Oxford is now a function room. This huge black cube was originally where inmates could receive visits from family and friends, as guards patrolled on gantries above to make sure nothing illicit was passed between felon and visitor. 
 
This is Oxford’s most idiosyncratic hotel. Suites where the prison governor used to live are very luxurious, but do ask to be shown the one cell that has been kept as it was when the prison closed. Not only is it a third of the size of the average ensuite hotel room, but in the 20th century these cells, originally judged big enough for one man, were eventually occupied by three. Charles Dickens, a committed prison reformer, lobbied for humane conditions so that prisoners might better themselves through study. It’s a sad story that Britain went backwards in the 20th century in terms of penal reform.
After your tour however do enjoy the restaurant where the food is superb and the service slightly cheeky. There is nothing remotely like this Malmaison anywhere in Oxfordshire.

WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
In addition to the Oxford colleges and museums, Oxford’s new Westgate Centre is only a hundred yards or so up from Malmaison. It houses all the big name shops, with a cinema and a smattering of good restaurants and bars, some with rooftop views.
Westgate Centre, Oxford


The Kingham Plough, Chipping Norton

The Kingham Plough, Chipping Norton

In 2004 a Country Life panel judged Kingham to be "England's Favourite Village". It’s certainly a great place to eat, with an excellent fine-dining restaurant at one end of the village and an even better pub with rooms: The Plough at the other. More commonly these days it’s known as The Kingham Plough, raising the status of the village still higher. 
This traditional seventeenth-century stone inn is the kind with a huge arch for coaches to trundle through at night. Here in a courtyard lit by torches horses could be changed and passengers could alight for the night.

Until 2019 The Plough was a fine dining restaurant with rooms, but when Matt and Katie Beamish took it over, they decided to recreate a village pub, something they felt that Kingham needed. With a bar, a dining room, a private dining room and a local’s table, The Plough caters for all tastes. It has outdoor seating too where the stables would have once stood and it has a reputation for great food. Ashleigh Farrand is the chef and has seen The Kingham Plough through Covid lockdowns and the strange days when easing regulations meant that all the pub’s tables and chairs were moved to a marquee in the car park.

Matt and Katie had been running pubs in the Cotswold for many years but, on his 40th birthday Matt decided on actual pub ownership as his new step forward. As he was eating potted goose at the time, that became the name of his new company, The Potted Goose Company.
 
The Goose group now has three pubs in a food triangle south of Chipping Norton. The subsequent additions are The Hare in Milton under Wychwood (a great place for seafood) and The Crown in Church Enstone.) Business at The Plough is good WHERE? with easily 100 people for lunch and for dinner most days. Although there are tables in the bar it’s better to eat in the dining room which is an unusual feature as it’s actually the top floor of the cruck-framed barn next door. The ancient timbers that hold up the roof are just above your head and the décor - a blue/grey Farrow & Ball paint called Hague recalls 18th century parlours. The red section of the dining room often doubles as a private dining room. Then there is the large local’s table opposite the bar which is the one table that cannot be booked. Villagers congregate here and discuss the world. It’s a nice touch in a pub that is as much for the community as the out of town guest.

Matt Beamish is an Oxfordshire local. He learned about the hospitality industry under Raymond Blanc while working at Oxfordshire’s famous Manoir aux Quatre Saisons, and the Petit Blanc in Cheltenham. He later worked for Jamie Oliver on the south coast of England and it was there that he met his wife. Katie had studied interior design and architecture at university before “stumbling” (as she puts it) into hospitality. She is responsible for much of the pleasing, eclectic look The Kingham Plough. Settles, armchairs and wicker chairs stand on old Indian carpets with a range of wall coverings whose visual style might best be described as “Pub Eclectic”. Ape & Spy cartoons, cricket bats, modern art gallery posters, a pair of squash rackets, coloured Victorian prints, postcards and a typesetter’s box adorn the walls
 
There are six bedrooms above the pub and archway, and a newly-acquired cottage, known as The Little Barn that sleeps four. Bedrooms at The Kingham Plough are not big, though the bathrooms are spacious and there’s a comfy armchair or two. Fabrics are gingham and tweed, recalling an earlier time of driving out when wealthy Oxonians or Londoners drove out into the country for a fine supper and a decent room. 
 
Many bedrooms look out onto the village green where in the morning you may see today’s oysters being delivered from Cornwall, the occasional child being coaxed reluctantly to school or a lady in a large striped nightie trying to call her oversized dogs back home. I certainly saw all three.
 
All human life is to be found at The Kingham Plough, a delightful village pub with some first-class food.

WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
Less than four miles north of Kingham stands Chastleton House, which was built between 1607 and 1612 and is a perfect example of a Jacobean manor. It enjoyed a flurry of excitement during the English Civil War when the lady of the manor drugged besieging Cromwellian soldiers so her royalist husband might escape.
It is now owned by the National Trust and featured (anachronistically) in the TV series, Wolf Hall.
Chastleton House

Rhodes House, Oxford

Rhodes House stands on a crossroads near the heart of the university in Oxford. No one building is Oxford University but Rhodes House occupies gardens close to Wadham and Trinity Colleges. It’s also close to the Sheldonian Theatre, the Natural History Museum and so many of the new science buildings (although “new” is always something of a relative term in medieval Oxford).
Like many of the buildings constructed between the two great European wars, Rhodes House has a neoclassical feel with its portico of eight ionic columns. Like St Anne’s College and the New Bodleian Library nearby, it is constructed out of “squared rubble” stones brought from nearby Bladon. 

Its most distinctive feature however is the rotunda behind the portico whose rooftop is crowned by a bronze of the Zimbabwe bird. 
That bird is a represents former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe the country that Cecil Rhodes carved out of South Africa in 1896. Above the outer doors is a stone carving of a sailing ship rounding the Cape of Good Hope. One of its sails displays the British Lion and the other the American Eagle. Rhodes House abounds with symbolism.
 
The idea behind Rhodes House developed from Cecil Rhodes’ will of 1902. A new trust would bring young men from all around the world to create an international community of leadership (many future presidents and prime ministers have been Rhodes Scholars over the last 100 years). The Rhodes Trust has subsequently redefined that role. Since 1977 women are also admitted as Rhodes Scholars, and while German scholarships were temporarily withdrawn during both World Wars, one of the moving tributes within the Rotunda is the commemoration of scholars who died on both sides in the Great War and World War II. These include Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff and Adam von Trott zu Solz who were executed after the July 1943 plot to kill Adolf Hitler.
At the very top of the Rotunda’s dome is a circle of 16 gilded symbols depicting constituent parts of the British Empire in 1928 (when the house was completed). They include the Welsh dragon, a Voortrekker’s covered wagon, the Egyptian sphynx, and a Canadian maple leaf.

Outside the dining hall, in the long gallery there is a valuable tapestry woven in 1901 to designs of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. It’s entitled The Romance of the Rose after the medieval French poem, translated into English by Geoffrey Chaucer. It was bequeathed to Rhodes House by Sir Hebert Baker, the architect of the house after his death in 1946.
It’s ironic that the figure of the (male) poet in this tapestry so resembles Jane Morris, William Morris’ muse and wife. She lived her childhood just a seven-minute walk away, the other side of Wadham College from Rhodes House. Jane grew up the daughter of a stableman in St Helen’s Passage next to the Turf Tavern – that was until William Morris discovered her beauty while painting murals at the Oxford Union in 1857. 
These days there are 35 ensuite bedrooms offered within this remarkable building. The actual Rhodes Scholars (all 102 of them) are housed within whichever of the university colleges they are attached to. Today hotel guests register in the East Lodge and are given a pass that lets them into most of the facilities including modern day café within the garden which offers excellent vegetarian food along with more carnivorous dishes from 8am to 5pm.
Rhodes House provides room-only accommodation and no parking (but then Oxford is a city to which only the foolhardy would bring a car) and there are lots of places to eat nearby, including the New Bodleian Library, the Kings Arms, The Turf Tavern and The White Horse, a tiny, semi-subterranean pub that often featured in episodes of TV’s Inspector Morse.

WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
Walk to the Jane Morris blue plaque in St Helen’s Passage and you will find yourself at the Turf Tavern, which exists in a series of small rooms between two streets. Access is only on foot. There used to be many more premises like the Turf in Britain, squeezed in between more reputable street-facing houses.

Turf Tavern, Oxfordshire

The Fleece, Witney

The Fleece, Witney

The Fleece Inn sits on Church Green in the centre of old Witney.  
A charter for a market-place at the north end of the village green dates from the fourteenth century, but it is likely that the Fleece is even older.  Its name reflects the fact that medieval Witney was a major centre for blanket-making, using wool from local Cotswold sheep with washing and dying in the waters of the River Windrush nearby. By the late nineteenth century, Witney blankets were famous all over the world. It is likely that many of the fleeces that built the town’s wealth were traded at this very inn.

What we do know for certain is that in 1811 The Fleece on the green was purchased by the Clinch family who were also owners of the Eagle Brewery, one of three breweries in Witney at the time.
They also owned the nearby Eagle Tavern. It was not unusual, in the days before good roads and even railways for a town to have its own brewery but for it to have three suggests a lot of business was being conducted in the pubs of Witney or it was a heavy drinking township. 
 
Fast forward to 2003 and the Fleece, now an “inn with rooms”, became part of Peach Pubs. This Oxfordshire-based company owns 22 properties across the middle of England. Today the Fleece offers ten bedrooms, some on the first floor of the pub and others in the cottage annex. It’s a cosy and popular place, and the rooms have a well-used, much-loved feel. The Fleece is often fully booked. If you’re lucky enough to get a room, you’ll probably find an armchair, a desk with tea and coffee-making facilities and a good view of the green from your double bed.
Downstairs, the bar and restaurant can cater for up to 100 people but because it’s divided into four dining areas, it never feels crowded. Sheep imagery abounds – from green cuddly rams on the mantelpiece, to lino-cut sheep prints above the banquettes, and sheep profiles on the backs of the bar stools. You cannot move for things fleecy at this pub. There are also some well-chosen exhortations written on the walls in white chalk: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what’s for lunch” (attributed to Orson Welles) “Making Life Peachy” the motto of Peach Pubs and "Serve the good stuff” (a tribute to all the local English produce on offer).
Among a number of signature dishes, The Fleece offers burgers and steak using meat from Aubrey Allen’s grass-fed beef and Jimmy Butler’s sausages from Norfolk. Indeed, three evenings a week there is a sausage promotional event known as “Sausage o’clock” when, between 5 and 6pm customers get one of Jimmy’s sausages free at the bar with their drink. Pescatarians like my wife can enjoy Colchester crab, salmon from the River Wye and fish from Cornwall.  The fact that not everything is always available – prawns were off when we dined recently – attests to the freshness of supplies.
The staff seem very happy in their work in that very cheery, hands-on way of Peach employees and the locals enjoy the place too, many of them turning up at 8am for breakfast.
WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
Cotswold Park and Gardens has giraffes and big cats like lions but also red pandas, rhinos, ostriches and Humboldt penguin. There’s also a whole house of lemurs that you can actually walk through.
Red Pandas, Cotswold Park


The Red Lion, Oxfordshire

In 1660 the Red Lion re-opened in Adderbury. This village in the north east of Oxfordshire did so to celebrate the restoration of King Charles II. With the demise of Oliver Cromwell’s puritan protectorate, pubs and theatres rushed to open up all over Britain.

At this point Thomas Austen took over as landlord of The Red Lion. We know this fact because a painted list of names and dates hangs near the entrance to the old building. Each was an innkeeper of the Red Lion, the job running through various families until the name of Dan Anderson appears in 2014. Dan hopes that if he stays on another ten years he will be – at 20 years - the longest serving landlord in the pub’s 375-year-old recorded history.

Other evidence of the Red Lion’s longevity include a very steep spiral staircase, low ceiling beams, the gracious Tudor Room (a quiet bar with dark 18th century oak-panelling) and photos of local morris dancing.  “Morris” is big in Adderbury and the three companies that perform this percussive folk ritual still stop outside each of the four pubs left in the village on May morning to jingle their bells and whack their sticks. They also perform outside the nine that have closed over the centuries as an act of remembrance. 
There also two big ancient log fireplaces in the pub (the kind you can actually stand inside if you are really cold) and a modern fruit machine (well you can’t have everything!)

The first challenge to guests arriving at The Red Lion is getting their luggage up to the 14 bedrooms above the many bars and single dining room.  It is barely possible to get a full-size journalist like me up those tight little stairs, but wholly impossible of they are carrying a suitcase too. Fortunately, there is a more modern staircase at the far end of the building which is the one you use when carrying cases in and out. 
 
 
The Red Lion is very much a village pub. The night we stayed; a wake was being held in the Tudor Room for a much-loved local grandmother. 
Meals are taken in the modern dining room that lacks some of the charm of the seventeenth-century bars and service can be slow on busy nights but the food is good and (unusually) the traditional English breakfast is available all day long. So, if you missed sausages, bacon, egg, tomato, beans and hash browns this morning order them for lunch - and dinner.
WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
Adderbury is a lovely village to visit. It contains the mansion of the second Earl of Rochester, a man so depraved that after the Restoration he lost his nose to syphilis - and was played by a convincingly nasally-challenged Johnny Depp in the 2005 film “The Libertine”. Ironically John Malkovich, one of the film’s producers and a man not greatly endowed in the nasal area played Charles II with a prosthetic conk which rather suited him. 
Below Adderbury House is a serpentine lake that was once part of the grounds of the mansion but is now offers a pleasant stroll for villagers and guests. The medieval parish church is massive and could probably seat all the regulars that those thirteen pubs that once kept Adderbury liquored up. 

Adderbury village, Oxfordshire

Spread Eagle, Thame

This historic coaching inn lies ten miles off The Ridgeway, an ancient British route which runs for over 100 miles across Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire.
Built in the eighteenth-century, the Spread Eagle sits in the middle of Thame, just thirteen miles east of Oxford. For hundreds of years this imposing redbrick hotel was known simply as The Eagle. In the early nineteenth century it gained a certain notoriety when housing captured Napoleonic officers in its cellars. (enlisted French soldiers were housed in the less salubrious Birdcage pub opposite). Then in 1922 the somewhat eccentric John Fothergill (1876 – 1957) took over The Eagle and renamed it The Spread Eagle. “At the ripe old age of 46,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I found that I must do something for a living, so I was counselled to take an inn.”

Fothergill was a minor Bloomsbury character, a literary hanger-on. He had been a very handsome chap, according to a sketch drawn by the libidinous Augustus John in 1906. He had also been a favourite of Oscar Wilde. After studying at Oxford, he helped run a London art gallery that sold Walter Sickert's paintings. Then, after a lifetime of doing very little but being adored, he took over the landlordship of The Eagle in 1922, claiming that Dora Carrington had painted the new pub sign for him.
 
How much of what occurs in Fothergill's memoirs, Confessions of an Innkeeper, is actually true is impossible to determine. His intention to create a fine-dining hotel in rural Oxfordshire was way ahead of its time and pretty much involved the eviction of farmers who frequented the old Eagle. In their place Fothergill wanted the Mayfair set who arrived but not in sufficient numbers to keep him solvent. Nothing in John Fothergill's background had led him to become an innkeeper. He had very little idea how to be a host and could be perfectly beastly to people he felt weren't right for his establishment. Most infamously he was known to add an unspecified charge of a few pounds to a bill. If guests queried it, they would be gruffly told that it was “Face Money.”
Face Money was invented one day when Fothergill was having to provide afternoon tea for 39 patrons. In his memoirs, he wrote, “I noticed they were almost all ill-shaped, ugly or ill-dressed." Fothergill’s answer was to charge a six-pence surcharge on guests he deemed unattractive. “Thus, for the first time in history, seven people without knowing have left an inn having paid 6d. each for not being beautiful. Surely this was a more praiseworthy action than the usual one of charging people extra because they are beautiful, well-bred and dressed?”  This habit of alienating customers who were not to his liking meant The Spread Eagle barely turned a profit. He did however manage to attract enough fashionable Bohemian Londoners during the interwar years to keep going.
 
Evelyn Waugh mentioned The Spread Eagle in his Brideshead Revisited and gave Fothergill a copy of his novel, Decline and Fall dedicated to “John Fothergill, Oxford's only civilizing influence.” Fothergill was a visionary with Raymond Blanc's level of ambition (Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, is only nine miles away) but unfortunately that flair was allied with Basil Fawlty's hostility towards “riff-raff”. After ten bitter years in Thame, he gave up. The last straw, according to a story still told by the staff, was that in the 1930s a splendid lady of the kind Fothergill courted arrived with her chauffeur in tow. Both were served with the same meal but whereas Her Ladyship enjoyed it, the servant complained that he did not. At this point John Fothergill decided the riff-raff had won and he quit.
 
Today some silver painted furniture, a bar decorated with oversized library style bookends and a lot of wood panelling are all that remain of Fothergill's vision.
 
There are however interesting elements of the hotel in its pre-Fothergill days. The breakfast room is said to have been an old fighting-cock pit, which explains the large window in the roof through which gamblers could watch the fighting birds on which they had bet. And there is of course a ghost, though thankfully not Fothergill's. He would give the wrong sort of guest a very bad time.
 
Go for lunch after you've read Confessions of An Innkeeper or if you're staying ask for one of the rooms at the front overlooking Cornmarket and the Birdcage Inn. It'll be a memorable experience.
WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
Two and a half miles north of Thame stands the white-washed Long Crendon Court House in Buckinghamshire. It was built in the fifteenth-century century and served as a wood store before housing manorial courts from the reigns of Henry V until Queen Victoria. It is now owned by the National Trust.
Long Crendon Courthouse
 
 

The Lion, Wendlebury

Wendlebury is a small village south of the famous consumer extravaganza that is Bicester Village. This designer shopping outlet is so well-known around the world that trains approaching its station have announcements recorded in Chinese and Arabic for the convenience of those who have flown across the world to visit.

By contrast Wendlebury is tiny and quiet. It’s one of those English villages that has grown up along a single road and its accompanying stream. It has a church whose steeple has fallen down repeatedly over the centuries and one public house, the Red Lion, which was built in the seventeenth century and is now known as The Lion Wendlebury.
In 1790 a brewery was started up by The Red Lion Inn but the business failed In 1820 a Bicester brewer bought it 1820. And in 2017 it was taken over by Brakspear Pubs of Henley on Thames. In the intervening time not much happened in Wendlebury except that the Lion just got longer and longer absorbing cottages to either side of it and building a modern dining room on the back. 
At first glance it now appears to occupy most of the village and has thirteen beautifully appointed bedrooms in a modern block behind the pub. Ryan Borrow, the young enthusiastic manager, actually lives above the pub which he says suits him fine but it can get noisy some evenings so a little separation for guests from the revelry is not a bad thing.

The Lion is very much a local pub and its décor typical of current English rural hostelry style with eclectic art work, chandeliers made of antlers, tweed chairs, original flagstones, shelves of old, unstealable hardback books, photos of forgotten ancestors and Victorian prints of lions. There are also boxes of board games by one of the working fireplaces and a blackboard on which Ryan advertises his latest wizard events. Stand by for “Thirsty Thursday” (25% off all “bubbles”) live music and quiz nights.
Because of the way the Lion has evolved there are lots of little rooms all over the place. One on the first floor used to be a cottage bedroom and is now a private dining room. But the large, bright, modern dining area to the rear is ideal for parties. The night I dined it was full of young American drama students, recently arrived in the UK and having one hell of a good time.

The thirteen bedrooms in a separate building to the rear are beautifully carpented with heavy wooden doors that open with a click and exquisitely tiled bathrooms (nice to see some colour for once – grey – everyone tiles in white these days). 
Breakfast is from 8am and majors on vegetarian or meat-heavy full Englishers plus the three sacred eggs of modern breakfast – Benedict, Florentine and Royal - and a variety of pancakes.

WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
Bicester Village is just like designer outlet malls all round the world but somehow it has an extra special cachet. It actually claims to be the second most-visited tourist attraction in Britain after Buckingham Palace.
Bicester village, Oxfordshire


The Bear & Ragged Staff, Cumnor

Cumnor is an ancient stone village on a hill southwest of Oxford. Among its residents is Sir Philip Pullman whose Dark Materials Trilogy added him to the long list of Oxfordshire fantasy writers including Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien and C.S.Lewis.  
Up here the air is clear. Oxford is more low-lying and can be damp and misty with its confluence of the Thames and Cherwell Rivers but early morning in Cumnor has a bright optimistic feeling. The pub sign creaks in front of the window of Room 7. It shows a bear climbing (or chained to) a log, the symbol of the Dukes of Warwick.

The Bear and Ragged Staff is one of two pubs in the village of Cumnor. It has just nine rooms and is a popular place to stay among visitors to Oxford. This famous university city is one of the most expensive places to park a car in Britain, so much better to use the Bear’s car park and take the bus into Oxford, a journey of about 15 minutes. 
The inn dates back to Elizabethan times and has a lovely historic core with two old stone fireplaces, flagstone floors, mullioned windows, and carved wooden lintels. If you approach from the road (rather than the car park) it’s like entering a film set for some historic BBC romp. Fielding’s Tom Jones could have feasted here.

There are four modern ensuite bedrooms overlooking the car park in what looks like a barn conversion but was actually a row of cottages originally. There are four more rooms on the first and second floor of the old Tudor inn. There is also an ancient bedroom (No 5) immediately behind the bar for those who do not mind the sound of wassailing interrupting their sleep. Personally, I’d love to stay there.
You can eat in the old bar with its cracked flagstones, ancient fireplaces and uneven furniture, and there is also the new open plan dining room to the rear of the pub. Personally I think there is nothing lovelier in autumn and winter to eat in an old bar with two log-burning stoves. For the rest of the year however the restaurant with its orange banquettes and some convincing wooden beams is sunny and a quick, efficient place to dine. 
Food at the Bear & Ragged Staff is always excellent. If Oxfordshire venison is on the menu, then go for it.

The wine list is impressively broad and includes some specialities in its “Undiscovered” section plus a nice selection of nightcaps called “One Last Glass”. This consists of whiskeys, brandies, rum and tequila, all of them ideal before you slowly toddle upstairs.
Breakfast includes American pancakes, eggs benedict, smashed avocado and bacon rolls from Jimmy Butler’s famous free-range pork.  Everything served by an enthusiastic staff.  Working at The Bear obviously brings out the best in the youngsters who run this pub.
The Bear has a blackboard on which it posts its 10 Promises. These include free range meat, seasonal fruit and veg and sustainable fish. Add in an excellent wine list and The Bear & Ragged Staff is well on its way to local celebrity status to rank with Sir Philip.

WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
The university city of Oxford is less than four miles by S9 bus into the city centre. Famed as a place of learning and architectural beauty, Oxford has also featured in so many films and TV series from Brideshead Revisited to His Dark Materials and, of course Inspector Morse and Endeavour.
Oxford City


The Crown Inn, Chipping Norton

On a sloping narrow lane off busy Enstone’s Bicester Road stands a seventeenth century pub with rooms. The Crown is a compact stone structure with an atmospheric flagstone bar festooned with garlands of dried hops. It also has a small garden full of picnic tables and a wine shed, known as the Social. This inviting structure has long trestle tables and wines priced by the bottle on the walls. There’s also a small dining room next to the bar and a modern conservatory which doubles as breakfast room.
Depending on your preference you can eat and drink in the old bar (though locals have a monopoly on the bar stools) or inside or outside. 

The food is excellent under chef Jason Christie.  Jason was previously sous chef at The Crown’s sister pub, The Kingham Plough. He describes himself as a “farm-to-fork” purist, sourcing ingredients locally and wasting as little as possible in food miles. The venison and pheasant you are eating were probably shot by one of the old guys gathered round the bar. He’s also been described (by a fellow journalist) as “the ultimate ‘scrap merchant’ because he tries not to let anything go to waste, pickling inventively in his spare time.
Fish however come from New Wave Seafood in Gloucestershire who can source all the way into Cornwall for overnight delivery of oysters, scallops and even lobster.

The wine list runs to around 40 reds, whites and rosés with fifteen or so by the glass and/or carafe. The list is mainly European with some South American and Australian choices. (It’s a similar list at The Crown, the Kingham Plough, and The Hare which is a fine dining restaurant in Milton Under Wychwood, owned by the same company, Potted Goose. Potted Goose was the brainchild of Matt Beamish who owns all three pubs with his wife, Katie. Matt crafts the wine list to match each the menu at each pub.) There are no English wines on offer currently but the Crown’s house water is extremely local, being produced from Blenheim Palace’s aquifer, just seven miles south of Enstone.
There are five bedrooms at The Crown, mostly bigger than the usual English pub size. They’re named after Oxfordshire villages like Great Tew, Heythrop and Cleveley. Painted tongue and groove walls and beautifully tiled bathrooms can be found in the bigger rooms. Bedrooms are on two floors above the pub, with the upper rooms at the top of a narrow staircase and below roof beams so you might decide to choose one of the lower ones like Lidstone or Great Tew. There are also double rooms in properties next to the pub:  The Studio and The Cottage.
 
Breakfast offers a range of dishes including the ever-popular smashed avocado on sourdough toast (does anyone not serve that now?) but also an excellent Full English Breakfast with back bacon, sausage and black pudding from Paddock Farm, a twenty-minute drive away, and eggs from Cackleberry Farm near Stow-on-the-Wold. An excellent vegetarian version is also available, says my wife.  
WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
Blenheim Palace is unmissable. Indeed, some people stay at The Crown just to visit Blenheim for the day. This is Britain’s only non-royal palace, built on the instructions of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. If you have seen the film The Confidant you will know her name (but nothing else of historical accuracy). Winston Churchill, a descendant of the Marlborough dukes, was born here. The July 2024 European Summit was hosted here by Keir Starmer and over 70 films have used its remarkable baroque exterior – more than any other English country house. When King George III saw Blenheim for the first time he exclaimed “We have nothing like this” and set about improving Buckingham Palace.
Blenheim Palace
 
 

The Rose Revived, Witney

Three hundred and eighty years ago – according to local Oxfordshire legend - Oliver Cromwell ordered an extra tankard of ale to refresh a rose he saw drooping. Once the ale was delivered, the flower did indeed revive. In 1644, the grim Parliamentarian cavalry general was looking to cross the River Thames at Newbridge and seize King Charles I from his temporary capital of Oxford. The alehouse that is now known as The Rose Revived stood next to an all-important bridge so it is possible that Oliver Cromwell did pause here before battle commenced and that he ordered that extra tankard.

The actual bridge at Newbridge was built in the thirteenth century and it is likely that pubs of various names have stood either side of it since that time.  This inn on the north bank of the Thames has gone by many names over the centuries, including The Fair House, The Rose and The Rose and Crown.
In 1919 the distinguished translator of Ibsen, Sir Edmund Gosse wrote to the Northam Manor Estate, owners of the pub. Gosse recalled that as a young man in Oxford in the 1870s he would walk to Newbridge with friends and that in those days it was known as The Rose Revived because of a local story from the days of the First Civil War. Gosse proposed that the old name also be revived - and so indeed it was. 
 
Today The Rose Revived provides a welcome break for those walking the Thames Path. It has seven bedrooms, four facing the river and all recently refurbished with William Morris throws, curtains and wallpaper. The pub calls itself dog-friendly and not only provides water bowls and snacks but doggy blankets. Its recently revamped, open-plan bar is still full of cosy corners but can accommodate 300 customers at busy times. The decor might be called “British "pub eclectic" - butterfly cases, collections of old bottles, framed fishing flies, ornithological prints, model barges and a disconcertingly varied range of wallpapers. There is also a covered terrace for al fresco dining.  The pub is overwhelmed with ivy and is screened from the river by a line of enormous weeping willows.
Whether Oliver Cromwell ever drank ale here will never be proved either way but we do know that the great Raymond Blanc, genius behind Britain's many Brasseries Blanc and Oxfordshire’s incomparable Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, started his career in English hospitality at The Rose Revived as a waiter in the 1970s, before teaching himself to cook and marrying the owner's daughter, Jenny in 1976.
WHAT TO SEE NEARBY:
The Thames Footpath is a 185-mile national trail that runs from Kemble in Gloucestershire all the way to southeast London through some beautiful countryside. From The Rose Revived walkers can either head east to The Ferryman Inn (1 hr 20) or west to the Trout at Tadpole Inn (2hr 10), both good places for lunch.
The Thames Footpath