Shipton-under-Wychwood

The Green, Memorial and Medieval Inn

A stone drinking fountain stands on the green, opposite the church. It commemorates seventeen members of the Hedges and Townsend families, agricultural labourers from Shipton who were emigrating to New Zealand when their ship, the Cospatrick, caught fire in the South Atlantic in November 1874. The memorial was put up in 1878. You will pass it as you find your bearings: the green, the church and the old inn facing them.

That inn is The Crown (historic Shaven Crown). It sits opposite St Mary's, a medieval hall house, with open fires inside and real ales on. The building is grand enough to have its own charity: the Crown Inn Charity was founded in 1578 and its rent once went towards keeping Shipton and Stokers bridges in repair. Look for the Tudor-arched passage running through it, and the small dovecote, both survivors of the older house.

Pubs, Bakery and Coffee

For food you have two other good options. The Wychwood Inn keeps a large garden and welcomes dogs in the bars and outside, though parts of the restaurant go dog-free when it fills up. The kitchen changes with the seasons but has run to pork tenderloin with creamy polenta, pan-seared hake with samphire and new potatoes, charred hispi cabbage with a smoked-almond puree, a cheeseburger, battered haddock and a rotating pie. The Lamb Inn, sixteenth-century and run by Peter Creed and Tom Noest, keeps things simpler and has its own large garden. Between the three, all in the village, you are unlikely to go hungry.

The bakery is worth planning a morning around. Corner Cottage Bakery, owned by Sarah, turns out sourdough, baguettes, focaccia, cakes and patisserie, and sells honey produced a mile away at Red Road Farm. The flour comes from Matthews Cotswold Flour, whose mill is in the village. For coffee and a sit-down there is The Cotswold Lounge at the Wychwood Business Centre, family- and dog-friendly, with free Wi-Fi and Sugarboo Cakes sharing the premises.

Country Paths, Wild Garden and St Mary's

The other reason to come is the walking. The Oxfordshire Way runs straight through Shipton, heading toward Charlbury one way and, eventually, Bourton-on-the-Water the other. A five-mile circular route starts from the Cotswold Lounge and loops through open countryside to neighbouring Milton-under-Wychwood and back, about three hours at a steady pace, mostly on good tracks with one stretch that turns muddy. Nearer the centre, the Wychwood Wild Garden opens twelve and a half acres of avenues, woodland, ponds and canals, with around a hundred lime trees, some said to be over 250 years old, an old Shipton Court fishpond and three small waterfalls. It is privately owned by a local charity and kept as a quiet place to walk.

St Mary's itself repays a slow look. The church is early thirteenth-century, extended in the fourteenth and restored in 1859 by G. E. Street, who virtually rebuilt the chancel. It keeps a three-stage west tower under a heavy stone spire, which Pevsner called "a bucolic version of Witney's," a two-storey south porch with worn medieval figures of St John and the Annunciation, a medieval stone pulpit and glass by Morris & Co in the west window.

Royal Wychwood Roots and Getting Here

The village name carries its history. Shipton sat beneath the old royal Forest of Wychwood, and Langley Lodge to the east marks a former royal hunting lodge. It was already substantial by 1086, when the Domesday surveyors recorded more than 150 households and six mills. The playwright Christopher Fry lived here in the 1940s and 1950s.

Getting here, the village is on the A361 about four miles north of Burford, with Burford itself an easy outing south. Shipton has its own railway station on Station Road, but the service is thin and there is no car park; Charlbury and Kingham are the useful stations nearby.

Village Cricket

On summer weekends you may find the cricket ground busy. The village club, twice a national village champion in 2002 and 2003, still runs four senior sides and takes children from the age of five.