The Fox sits on The Green, and the village campaigned to bring it back. After the pub closed, a petition gathered 325 signatures, close to half the people in Leafield, and The Fox reopened in April 2011. David Cameron, then prime minister and the local MP, came for a pint. Mo and Joe run it now.
The kitchen deals in hearty British food without much fuss. You might find battered halloumi with sweet chilli sauce, liver and bacon with mash, or hickory chicken under bacon, barbecue sauce and mature cheddar. There is fish and chips with mushy peas, and Sunday roasts across lamb, beef, pork, chicken and a nut roast. Two changing ales are usually on the bar, sometimes as many as four. Dogs are welcome and get treats. The garden is planted with flowers and looks out over the Green; when the weather turns, there is a fire indoors.
For everything else there is the village shop on Fairspear Road, Peapell Stores, also known as the Leafield Village Community Shop. It keeps a Post Office counter and sells bread from Marks Cotswold Bakery.
Leafield stands high and exposed, on what the parish council calls the "remote, up on the windy highground between Witney and Charlbury." The cottages are honey-coloured stone, most of them 17th to 19th century, set along narrow lanes around the open common Greens. Until the 1850s the village sat in an isolated clearing surrounded by Wychwood Forest, and its people, the Fieldtowners, kept their own dialect, their own Morris tradition and their own version of the mummers' play. The church spire is still the thing you see from a distance.
A volunteer-run community gym beside the village hall has a treadmill, cross-trainer, rower, bike, multi-gym and free weights, open to members from the age of fourteen. The recreation ground next door has a playground, a skate park and a playing field. On Fairspear Road the 1.3-acre Community Woodland, planted in 2000, welcomes dog walkers and has hosted moth nights, bat nights, bug hunts, dawn-chorus mornings and storytelling.
Walkers have the run of the forest. Wychwood Walk No. 8 is a 5.5-mile circular that starts at the Village Green, follows Pay Lane, an old track between dry-stone walls, and passes the western end of Blindwell Wood, Akeman Street and the former Second World War airfield landscape. The 37-mile Wychwood Way runs through the village too, linking Woodstock, Stonesfield, Chadlington and a string of neighbouring places along the old royal forest. There is also a strenuous 12-mile Ramblers loop taking in Finstock and Ramsden, with hills and, in most weathers, mud.
The church, St Michael and All Angels, was built in 1859–60 to a design by Sir George Gilbert Scott, and it has never made peace with its own spire. Lady Churchill laid the foundation stone on All Saints' Day in 1858; within five years bad weather had damaged the first spire, it was rebuilt in 1865, and lightning most likely took it down again in 1934, after which it was shortened. Inside there is a Nicholson of Worcester organ, still in use, and faded sheet-metal scrolls painted with texts by the vicar's wife. The benefice records eight bells, dedicated in 1874, and a clock from 1875.
Older marks sit around the village. North-west of the church is Leafield Barrow, a Norman motte castle whose mound is 38 metres across; the square feature on top may be the remains of a stone keep. The village cross was restored in 1873 as a memorial to the inhabitants' escape from smallpox, the old shaft having been smashed by vandals some twenty years earlier.
The height that made Leafield windy also made it useful. Marconi chose the site for wireless experiments in 1912, and thirteen 305-foot masts went on to serve the Imperial Wireless Chain, then carried Reuters, maritime and government traffic, and were used as a long-wave link during the Falklands War before satellites made the station obsolete and it closed in 1986. The same ground later became a motorsport base where Tom Walkinshaw Racing developed Arrows Formula One cars.
Getting here means rural roads, about four miles north-west of Witney; Charlbury, five miles off, is the practical train station, and the Villager community bus runs to Witney on set days that are worth checking before you rely on them.
Fred Williams, the last of the village potters, was known to everyone as the donkey-man. His family had moved the pottery to the ground behind The Fox by 1861, and it is a quiet thing to stand on the Green now and know that ground once supplied the clay, later worked by Groves into land drains, tiles and bricks.
