Curfew Tower, Moreton-in-Marsh

The Curfew Tower is a small stone bell tower on the corner of the High Street and Oxford Street in Moreton-in-Marsh, facing the wide market street. It dates from the sixteenth century, and both Historic England's listing and its scheduling suggest it may be the oldest public building in the town. Its bell is dated 1633, and it was also the town's lock-up.

History

Moreton has been a market town since its charter of the 1220s, and the Curfew Tower stands on the edge of that old market place. It did two jobs for the town: it carried the bell and the clock, and it held the drunk and the disorderly, because Moreton had nowhere else to lock them up.

The bell and the clock

The bell is dated 1633 and the clock 1648. An inscription, no longer visible, recorded seventeenth-century gifts from Robert Fry: 10 shillings for a bell ringer and 20 shillings for keeping the clock in repair. The bell is said to have been rung every day until 1860; the listing calls it the curfew bell, and tradition has it that the bell gave the tower its name. The clock's works were taken out in the 1950s.

The lock-up

The scheduling records that the tower served as Moreton's lock-up, where local drunks and minor offenders were held. Inside, a low plank bench against the north wall was presumably added in those years. Historic England scheduled the tower as a monument in 1955, for its place in the life of the market town from the sixteenth century onwards.

What to see

The tower is small: two storeys of stone rubble under a stone slate roof, with a gabled turret for the bell and a cockerel weathervane on top. Facing the street is a four-centred arched doorway with a smaller loft door above it, both with studded wooden doors. The inside, which you cannot enter, is only about 2m square and has no east wall of its own, which suggests it was built against another building. Its walls were plastered, with floorboards over an earth floor, and a second floor about 4m up.

Visiting

The Curfew Tower is seen from outside, from the pavement of the High Street, at any time and for nothing; the doors are kept padlocked. The best time to see it in its setting is a Tuesday, market day, when the stalls fill the High Street, though early on a quiet morning you can take a photograph without the traffic.

Getting there

Moreton-in-Marsh station is a few minutes' walk away, with trains to London Paddington in about an hour and a half. The 801 bus links the town with Stow, Bourton, Cheltenham and Chipping Norton, and Stagecoach buses run to Stratford-upon-Avon. By car, the Old Market Way car park (GL56 0JY) is the nearest council car park. On foot, the Moreton and Batsford walk starts at the war memorial, about 100m north up the High Street, and turns off into Corders' Lane almost opposite the tower.

Nearby

Redesdale Hall, the market hall of 1887, stands in the middle of the High Street beside it, and the Redesdale Arms, the White Hart Royal, the Swan Inn and the Manor House are all within a few minutes' walk. The Black Bear Inn, a Donnington Brewery pub, is on the High Street too. The walk goes on to Batsford, whose neo-Norman St Mary's Church is the Redesdales' estate church. In Stow-on-the-Wold, the market cross is another relic of a Cotswold market place.