The Red Lion carries a moulded datestone inscribed WW/1748, set into limestone. Inside there is an inglenook fireplace, high-backed settles, a bar, a restaurant and seven rooms upstairs. Sarah and Lisa managed the place from 2004 and took over the lease at the end of 2023, and they run it themselves now. It is the village's pub, and the Parish Council thought enough of that to have it registered as an Asset of Community Value.
The menu changes with the season; past diners have singled out the roast beef with homemade Yorkshire puddings, Hooky Pie with new potatoes, and sticky toffee pudding with salted-caramel ice cream. The Hooky in the pie is Hook Norton beer. Dogs are welcome for a drink, a meal or the night: there is a dog menu, a stay kit of bowl, towel and mat, and a pub dog called Bella. The garden is large and has a children's playground, and indoors there is a games room with a pool table and a dartboard.
For everything else, the Village Stores sits on Main Street and sells raffle tickets for the village fete. A mobile Post Office pulls into the parking area on the same street for Royal Mail and Parcelforce business.
Long Compton runs in a single line along the A3400, the old Oxford–Stratford road, down in the valley of a stream that feeds the River Stour. The houses are warm Cotswold limestone with stone walls, thatch and stone-slate roofs, and the whole village is hemmed in by steep slopes. Around Back Lane and to the north-east of Weston Gardens the fields still carry the corrugation of medieval ridge and furrow. Kingham station is about five miles off and Moreton-in-Marsh a little further; the Stagecoach 50 runs through the village between Stratford, Shipston and Chipping Norton.
The church of St Peter and St Paul is Grade I and mostly early thirteenth century, with a chancel a little later, a porch from the late fourteenth, and a chantry chapel and clerestory added in the fifteenth. Henry Woodyer restored it in 1862–63. The south porch keeps its double plank doors, dated 1620, and a sundial scratched into the stone. Look up inside and the reconstructed nave roof is held by carved figures — angels, a woman's head, a mitred bishop, and a priest holding a chalice and a book. Six bells hang in the tower, two from 1652, three from 1731 and one from 1823. Pale walls and mostly clear glass make it notably light inside, and it is normally open in daylight hours, the largest of the seven churches in its benefice.
The lychgate began as something else. It is a former cottage, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, cut through underneath to make a passage; it once ended a row of cottages, later did service as a cobbler's and then an antiques shop, and was handed to the church in 1964. The local history society meets in the room above.
The land around the village is what most people come for. South of Long Compton, on the ridge between Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, stand the Rollright Stones: the Whispering Knights dolmen, raised around 3800–3500 BC, the King's Men circle from about 2500 BC, and the solitary King Stone from about 1500 BC. The walk up to them from the village is about 4.8 miles and steadily uphill, some 620 feet of climb, with wide views from the top. The D'Arcy Dalton Way passes close by the stones; Shakespeare's Way runs through nearby Little Rollright and calls for a short detour to reach them.
The Domesday commissioners counted eighty-six households here in 1086, along with twenty-five enslaved people, a priest, and a mill worth ten shillings, and valued the manor at thirty pounds — double what it had been worth twenty years before.
There is a darker page. In September 1875 a farm labourer named James Haywood killed Ann Tennant, an eighty-year-old widow, with a pitchfork, in the belief that she was one of about twenty witches in the area. The Times described her as "an old woman, of harmless character, whose ill fame as a witch depended on her sex and age and absolutely nothing else."
Behind the Village Stores lies Aunt Phoebe's Recreation Ground, a small green kept for the people who live here. The fete is held on it each summer, and the raffle tickets on the shop counter are for that.
