Great Rollright

The former pub and the hilltop village

The Unicorn stands on the High Street, a three-storey limestone building with segmental-arched windows and a chimney stack at each gable. It was the village pub, and it has not poured a pint in a long time. By residents' own account, the village has been without a working pub for more than fifteen years, and the shop and the fixed post office went the same way. What arrives now is a mobile Post Office van, calling at the Village Hall car park on its rounds; check the Post Office's own finder for current times before you rely on it.

The village sits high on a hill just north of Chipping Norton, with the ground falling away to wide views across the valley.

The Village Hall is the practical focus of the community now. There is a newly installed children's playground, a small outdoor gym, a car park, and a covered veranda at the back with a barbecue and outdoor furniture set against the same long views. The hall has a kitchen and rooms to hire, and a defibrillator by the door. Jan Wilkinson takes the bookings.

Walking to three prehistoric monuments

What you come here to do is walk. The D'Arcy Dalton Way runs through, linking Great Rollright to Little Rollright and Salford and passing just south of the Whispering Knights. A five-and-a-half-mile route strings the village, the Rollright Stones, Little Rollright and Salford together and finishes in Chipping Norton, about two and a quarter hours of open country if you don't stop, which you will. Shakespeare's Way comes through Little Rollright as well, and there is open-access land in a shallow downland valley near the village.

The Rollright Stones stand on the crest of the hills a short way west, on the county line. They are three monuments from three different ages: the Whispering Knights, a burial chamber from around 3800 BC; the King's Men, a stone circle from about 2500 BC; and the King Stone, a single standing stone from roughly 1500 BC. Much of the King Stone's damage is put down to nineteenth-century souvenir hunters, and the Rollrights were among the earliest monuments taken into state guardianship. The legend ties them together. A witch met an ambitious king and told him that if he could see Long Compton in seven strides the kingdom was his. A mound rose and blocked the view, and she turned him to stone as the King Stone, his army to the King's Men, and his scheming knights to the Whispering Knights. She became an elder tree.

Medieval detail at St Andrew's

Back in the village, the Church of St Andrew is Grade I listed and worth the detour for its south doorway alone. It is late twelfth century, carved with beakhead and chevron, scalloped capitals and a tympanum above. The west tower is fifteenth century and carries eight winged gargoyles. Inside there is an octagonal fifteenth-century font, a richly carved medieval rood screen and canopy, five stained-glass roundels of the same period, and the 1522 brass of rector James Battersby.

The screen's medieval colours were repainted between 1851 and 1856 by the curate, W. C. Flint, and his wife. This was after the rector, Joseph Brooks, reportedly fled the church and the country one Sunday, deeply in debt. Flint founded the village school as well.

Domesday and dinner beyond the village

The Domesday surveyors found the place split between three owners, with thirty-seven households and a single salthouse, and valued the three holdings at thirteen pounds, exactly what they had been worth twenty years earlier.

For a proper dinner you go out of the village. The Red Lion at Long Compton is a dog-friendly inn with high-backed settles and an inglenook fireplace, a large beer garden and a changing menu built on local, seasonal food. In Hook Norton, the Pear Tree serves beer-battered fish with triple-cooked chips, roasted Cotswold chicken breast with spring-onion mash, and sticky toffee pudding, with Hook Norton beer from the brewery down the road. The brewery itself runs tours, more than a hundred steps of them and not suited to small children, along with a shop, a museum and the Malthouse Kitchen.

Arriving in Great Rollright and a remarkable gravestone

Getting here means minor roads north of Chipping Norton. Kingham appears to be the nearest railway station, and the Stagecoach 488 stops at The Green, running roughly hourly Monday to Saturday and roughly every two hours on Sunday, linking the village to Chipping Norton, Hook Norton and Banbury; check times before you travel.

Just inside the lychgate at St Andrew's is the gravestone of Richard Widdows, a shepherd. The inscription gives his age at death, in 1910, as a hundred and four.