Scenic Place in Oxfordshire

Burford is one of the finest and most completely preserved Cotswold market towns, a settlement on the River Windrush in Oxfordshire whose long High Street descending steeply to the medieval bridge provides one of the most satisfying townscapes in the English countryside. The combination of the fifteenth-century church of St John the Baptist, the former wool merchant houses of the High Street and the surrounding Windrush Valley landscape creates a destination of exceptional quality and historical depth. The church of St John the Baptist at the foot of the High Street is one of the largest and most richly decorated medieval churches in the Cotswolds, its interior containing elaborate perpendicular Gothic stonework, brasses and monuments of considerable quality and a remarkable collection of seventeenth-century wall tablets. The church has a specific historical association with the Levellers, the radical democratic movement of the English Civil War whose soldiers were imprisoned in the church by Cromwell's forces in 1649 before three of their leaders were shot in the churchyard in the suppression of the Leveller mutiny. The High Street descends between buildings of consistent Cotswold limestone quality from the broad upper market area through progressively steeper and narrower sections to the medieval bridge over the Windrush. The range of independent shops, galleries and the quality of the accommodation available in this relatively small town reflects the sustained popularity of Burford as a destination for visitors who seek the Cotswold experience in a genuinely historic rather than a commercialised context.

Great Tew in Oxfordshire is one of the finest estate villages in England, a settlement of thatched ironstone cottages of the seventeenth century arranged around a village green in a composition of English village perfection that was created by the landscape designer J C Loudon who laid out the Great Tew estate in the early nineteenth century with a comprehensive plan that included the arrangement of the village buildings, the planting of the estate woodland and the improvement of the cottages in a unified aesthetic programme. The result is a village that appears entirely natural but is in fact a designed landscape of considerable sophistication. The ironstone cottages of Great Tew, thatched and draped in climbing plants in a condition of perfect maintenance, provide one of the most photographed and most consistently admired village streetscapes in Oxfordshire. The estate cottages were designed by Loudon with a consistent architectural character that gives the village an unusual unity of appearance, and the subsequent care of the estate has maintained this character against the pressures of modernisation that have compromised similar villages elsewhere. The village pub, the Falkland Arms, is one of the finest traditional village pubs in Oxfordshire, its interior of ancient beams, clay pipes and numerous ales providing the character of a genuinely traditional English inn in a building that has served this function since the sixteenth century. The combination of the village character and the pub creates a destination of considerable appeal for those seeking the authentic English village experience.