Minster Lovell, Crawley and the Windrush

The Minster Lovell and Crawley walk is a 3.7-mile (6km) circular walk from Minster Lovell, a village on the River Windrush about 3 miles west of Witney. It is almost flat and takes about an hour and a half, by the Lamb at Crawley and the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall, with the Old Swan at the end.

Minster Lovell Hall

The ruins at the end of the walk are those of a house built in the 1430s by William, Lord Lovell and Holand, who English Heritage says was one of the richest men in England. His grandson Francis, who served the Yorkist cause, was made Viscount Lovell by Richard III. After Bosworth in 1485 the hall passed to the Crown, then in 1602 to the lawyer Sir Edward Coke. His descendant Thomas Coke abandoned it for Holkham in Norfolk, and in about 1747 most of it was pulled down for building stone.

What survives is the great hall, its walls standing up to 12m high, a vaulted entrance porch, and a four-storey tower at the south-west corner, thought to date from Francis Lovell's time. The circular fifteenth-century dovecote, with its conical roof and stone nesting boxes inside, stands about 100m from the main ruins and can be seen only from outside. The hall is free and open at any reasonable time in daylight, and dogs on leads are welcome. There are no toilets.

Francis Lovell's disappearance after the battle of Stoke, the skeleton said to have been found in a hidden room and the bride in the chest are told in our story three dooms at Minster Lovell Hall, one of our strange things in the Cotswolds.

St Kenelm's, the Old Swan and the bridges

St Kenelm's church, beside the ruins, is mid-fifteenth century and Grade I, with a central tower and a reredos of 1876 by J. L. Pearson. English Heritage points out the alabaster tomb of a Lord Lovell inside and the vaulting under the tower, and sells its guidebook there.

In the village, the Old Swan is probably early seventeenth century with a sixteenth-century cross-wing, jettied at its end, and the base of a cross, probably fifteenth century, stands about 10m west of it. Minster Lovell Bridge, by the car park, is probably early nineteenth century, a three-arched bridge and a single-arched one built as one. Crawley's bridge, probably late eighteenth century, has three round arches with pointed cutwaters, and the Lamb at Crawley is probably a mid-seventeenth-century inn, with an addition dated 1791.

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What walkers report

In summer walkers report herons, a red kite and a kingfisher by the river (August and September 2026), and paths overgrown in places, with nettles reaching across them (July and August 2026). Several stop at the Lamb in Crawley halfway for a drink or coffee. When we checked, the Lamb's own site gave its hours as Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 10.30pm and Sunday 11am to 4.30pm, closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and closed over Christmas on Boxing Day and from 4 to 7 January (on Christmas Day it opens for drinks only, 11am to 2pm).

Winter is another matter. Walkers report the path impassable just after Crawley, where it turned into a stream (January 2026), the riverside badly flooded and muddy, needing wellingtons (December 2025), and fields so muddy they had to find a way round (March 2026). Cows graze one of the fields (April 2026), and one walker kept their dog on a lead much of the way (June 2026). Walkers report three stiles on the way to Crawley.

Staying and walking on

Minster Mill, the Old Swan's sister hotel, has a spa on the Windrush, and both take dogs in some rooms; our guide to where to stay around Witney has more. The hall has its own page among our places to visit.

Further up the river, our walks from Burford by Fulbrook and Widford and from Swinbrook follow the Windrush through its next villages, and downstream, Witney Lake and Cogges is a flat loop from the middle of Witney. All are in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds.