Ascott-under-Wychwood

Village Food and Footpaths

The Swan Inn stands at 4 Shipton Road, a 16th-century inn with eleven rooms above the bar. The kitchen, run under the Lionhearth name, does modern British cooking that changes with the season — grill dishes, pub classics, pizzas and Sunday roasts — and there is an attractive garden. Dogs are welcome. The building is older than its paperwork: the first written record dates from 1790, and it almost certainly stood for some time before that. Andrew, who stayed here in September 2025, called it a "comfortable inn set in peaceful picturesque Cotswold village."

Down the High Street at Cook Row, the village shop is owned and run by the village. Residents fitted out a bare shell and opened it in 2003, and it now sells local produce alongside baguettes and pasties baked on the premises.

The walking is a large part of the appeal. The Oxfordshire Way runs beside the River Evenlode, and from the green you can pick up Wychwood Walk No. 4, a seven-mile loop to Chadlington that crosses field paths and brooks through Pudlicote, Shorthampton and Chilson and passes the site of Ascot d'Oilly Castle. A shorter stretch of the Oxfordshire Way covers the 1.6 miles from Shipton-under-Wychwood, over the Evenlode and the railway. There is also an easy river loop of about two and a half miles from the green, though the published route is old, so check the paths locally before you set out.

Along the Evenlode

Somewhere on the Oxfordshire Way between Ascott and Pudlicote stands an oak with a seven-metre girth, said in the village to be more than five hundred years old.

Ascott is the smallest of the three Wychwood parishes, set in the Evenlode Valley between Burford, Charlbury and Chipping Norton. The station is in the village, on Shipton Road, with step-free access to both platforms and no car park; trains are few, and National Rail itself points you to Charlbury or Kingham for anything frequent. The B4437 heads for Charlbury and Burford, and the A361 runs past Five Shilling Corner towards Chipping Norton. The V19 community bus connects the Wychwoods with Chipping Norton, and the weekday 210 runs via Ascott to Witney, though timetables are worth checking before you rely on them.

Recreation and Two Settlements

For families there is the Green, the Pound, the playground and the Memorial Playing Field, bought in 1948 as a war memorial recreation ground and fitted with play equipment in 2014. Coldstone Angling Club holds the fishing rights on this stretch of the Evenlode, but the water is club-controlled rather than open to visitors.

The modern village joins two Domesday settlements, Ascot d'Oyley and Ascot Earl. In 1086 the first was worth eight pounds and the second four. Ascott d'Oyley Manor House still stands inside the bailey of a castle raised around 1129 and pulled down some fifty years later; the motte is private, but the dykes and moat show from the river and the footpath. Turf mounds west of the village mark where Ascot Earl had a castle of its own.

Church and Martyrs

The Church of the Holy Trinity is late 12th century, with 14th-century alterations and a restoration by G. E. Street in 1857. It has rubble walls and Cotswold-stone roofs, a three-stage west tower, a four-bay Norman arcade, Norman capitals in the south porch and a 15th-century octagonal font. Its triple sedilia — the three stone seats set into the chancel wall — is the best feature in the church, with similar examples at Shipton and Idbury.

On 12 May 1873, about forty village women picketed Crown Farm in support of farm labourers asking for higher wages. Sixteen were sentenced to hard labour, seven for ten days and nine for seven, and two of them carried infants into Oxford Gaol; a crowd of some two thousand had gathered in Chipping Norton. Queen Victoria pardoned the women. The labourers did not get their rise. A bench on the green remembers them, the current one dating from 2000.

Tiddy and Winston

Reginald Tiddy, a folklorist, arrived in 1909, collected folk plays and revived the local Morris. He paid for Tiddy Hall in 1912 and gave it a sprung dance floor. He was killed near Laventie in 1916, aged thirty-six, while looking for wounded men.

In the 1960s a village syndicate bought a donkey called Winston to run in the annual donkey derbies. He never won a race.