The White Horse is the last pub in Stonesfield, and the village bought it to keep it. After a campaign that drew shareholders from beyond the UK, they clubbed together in September 2023, and the pub reopened on 14 June 2024 under a tenant, Craig Tipper, working with his business partner Barbara. It is a Cotswold-stone building with exposed beams and fireplaces, and the kitchen keeps to familiar things done properly: fish and chips, an 8oz minced-steak burger in a toasted American-style bun, and something the menu calls the Now Legendary Chicken & Leek Pie. There is sticky toffee pudding, local ale, and water and biscuits for dogs. "Our attraction to running a community pub is exactly that – the community," Tipper said before taking it on.
For everything else there is Suriya Express, the village shop in Pendle Court at the centre of things, which also holds the Post Office. A hairdresser and a garage complete the working core of the place. For anything more specialist, there is a volunteer food group that cooks at the Village Hall and hands out portions to take home.
That Village Hall does a lot: a large hall with a stage and bar, a club room, a full kitchen, and the village library next door. Outside there is a play park and a football pitch. The Sports and Social Club fields the Stonesfield Strikers, a cricket club and a tennis club, and volunteers keep the Common, which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
Walking is a major attraction. The signed circular from the churchyard runs about seven and a quarter miles and takes most of an afternoon: no stiles, but a few short steep climbs and some wall steps to negotiate. It drops down Brook Lane to the River Evenlode, crosses fields and railway arches, passes North Leigh Roman Villa, and loops through Combe and the edge of the Blenheim Estate before returning along Bagg's Bottom and a stretch of the Oxfordshire Way. The Cock Inn at Combe is the halfway stop. The land undulates gently for the most part, dropping to the river and rising again through Whitehill Wood.
The church is St James the Great, thirteenth-century with fourteenth-century changes and a battlemented tower carved with gargoyles. Inside there is a fifteenth-century oak screen, an octagonal stone font from the fourteenth century, and fragments of medieval glass in the windows. The north aisle was rebuilt in 1825, the church restored in 1876, and a vestry added in 1956.
Stonesfield Slate was not slate at all but a thin Jurassic limestone, split for roofing and mined from shafts recorded up to twenty-two metres deep; the industry vanished in the early twentieth century, and four former mines — Coldshore Cottage, Home Close, Robinson's and Spratt's Barn — form part of the site's geological type locality. Quarrymen kept turning up fossils, and one of those finds reached William Buckland at Oxford, who, working with the illustrator Mary Morland and the anatomist Georges Cuvier, published the name Megalosaurus in 1824, the first dinosaur ever given a scientific one. Many of those bones are still in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
There is a second Roman thread. A mosaic pavement was dug up near the village in 1712 and later lost; women in a Herefordshire family probably copied its design in wool and silk between 1728 and 1735, and that embroidery now sits in the Oxfordshire Museum at Woodstock.
Domesday recorded eight households here in 1086 and valued the whole place at thirty shillings.
Getting in and out is straightforward. The Stagecoach S3 stops at Prospect Close on its way to Oxford, and for the train, the village points visitors to Charlbury or Long Hanborough rather than the closer Finstock station; check which suits before you travel. The M40 is within easy reach.
The village magazine is still called The Stonesfield Slate. It comes out every month, free, and you pick it up in the shop, the pub or the library.
