On the green at Chapel Lane sits a weathered cross base, moved here from the A44 in 2003. A plaque gives it a date of around AD 700, though that belongs more to local tradition than to anything you could pin down. It is a fair introduction to Salford, a village a mile and a half west of Chipping Norton, where the older a claim gets the harder it is to settle.
The village is small and quiet, 332 residents at the last count, arranged around open farmland, stone cottages and a spring-fed stream that runs through the narrow valley west of the church. People come here for what surrounds it rather than what is in it.
Most of that is walking. The green is the start of a 4.7-mile circular to the Rollright Stones, about three hours at a moderate pace, crossing farmland, a stream and a run of stiles to reach the Whispering Knights and the King's Men stone circle before returning along the D'Arcy Dalton Way through Little Rollright and two patches of woodland. The going is grass and mud in the wet, with a couple of climbs, and it is not wheelchair-friendly. The walking writer Ben Lerwill, describing the stones for Countryfile, wrote that "the boulders' strange, hefty presence makes this a special spot." A signed field path also links the village to Chipping Norton, leaving the town by the cemetery and dropping downhill with views towards the Cotswolds.
Half a mile out, at Rectory Farm, Salford Trout Lakes offers fly-fishing across two lakes stocked with rainbow, brown, Sparctic, blue and tiger trout, though fishing may be restricted or suspended during a hot summer, so it is worth checking before you go. Back in the village there is a grassy playground and green by the hall.
What Salford does not have, at present, is a pub. The Black Horse, which traded for a spell as the Salford Inn, closed in September 2025 and is being sold, its stone frontage, terrace and detached cottage now part of the sale. For food and supplies you are better pointed at Chipping Norton, a mile and a half off, with its independent shops, Wednesday market, third-Saturday farmers' market, a theatre, a museum and a heated outdoor lido. The village sits just off the A44. Kingham station, run by Great Western Railway, is about four miles away and has parking for 140 cars. Public transport into the village amounts to the Villager V8 community bus, which calls on Fridays only, towards Chipping Norton at 10:16 and back around midday, and is worth confirming before you rely on it.
The Church of St Mary is the one building that rewards a slow look. Its 12th- and 14th-century origins were largely rebuilt by G. E. Street in 1854–55, but the Norman north doorway survived and was reset: a Maltese cross flanked by a centaur drawing a bow and a lion, with carved beast-heads at the stops. Inside is a circular 12th-century font ringed with intersecting arcading, and two rustic Bolter family memorials. The earlier, from 1640, remembers John Bolter and his son, both dead that same year. The later, from 1694, records the baby Joseph Bolter and his mother Sarah, who died three weeks apart.
Beside the church the ground itself keeps the outline of a house that is no longer there: three broad garden terraces, a dry fishpond, a buried gatehouse and service ranges, a great house that geophysics suggests ran to more than forty metres by twenty. In 1086 the Domesday commissioners found six households and half a mill, and valued the whole place at three pounds. It had been worth exactly the same twenty years before.
Chastleton House, a Jacobean pile the National Trust keeps much as its family left it, is about two and a half miles on for anyone with a spare afternoon. But most of what Salford offers is closer to hand: the field paths, the stream in its valley below the church, and the quiet green where the Rollright walk begins.
