Swinbrook and Asthall

What to see

St Mary's, Swinbrook is the reason most people stop. In the chancel the Fettiplace monuments of about 1613 and 1686 each show three men lying on their sides on stone shelves, one above another, propped on an elbow as if waiting for dinner; a third, of 1743, is a marble bust. The Fettiplaces were lords of the manor here from 1503 until the late eighteenth century, and their mansion south of the church was pulled down about 1810. In the churchyard are the graves of four Mitford sisters, Nancy, Unity, Diana and Pamela, and their parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale; Nancy, Unity and Diana lie close together near the porch, and the others elsewhere in the churchyard. The church has no fixed opening hours, so it may be locked; the churchyard is always open.

Asthall Manor and the churches

Asthall Manor is the Jacobean house beside Asthall church, built about 1620 for Sir William Jones and bought by Lord Redesdale in 1919. He turned the barn into a library and music room for his children, and Nancy Mitford drew on the house for The Pursuit of Love. It is a private home. From 2002 to 2022 it held on form, a show of stone sculpture in the garden; the owner, Rosie Pearson, has ended it, and the house now opens irregularly, in 2026 in February and on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday afternoons from 20 May to 20 June, with workshops and events the rest of the year. Check its site before you drive out; on any other day there is nothing to see from the lane but the gate.

St Nicholas, Asthall, next to the manor, is a thirteenth-century church with a tomb recess of about 1350 holding a reclining woman with a lion at her feet, restored in the 1880s. About 700m west of Swinbrook, St Oswald's, Widford stands alone in a meadow on the site of a Roman villa, all that is left of a village that emptied: box pews, faint wall paintings, no road. You reach it on foot only.

An afternoon here

Start at the Swan in Swinbrook and walk up to St Mary's, ten minutes, for the chancel and the churchyard. Take the riverside footpath west to Widford, about 700m, for St Oswald's in its field, and come back the same way. Cross the bridge and follow the lane south-east to Asthall, a mile, for the church and a look at the manor gate, and finish at the Three Horseshoes, whose garden looks back over the valley you have walked. Allow three hours. You will meet cattle, one stile and, at weekends, cars on the single-track lanes.

Walks

Swinbrook, Fulbrook and Widford is a 4.3-mile (6.9km) easy loop of about two hours from the Swan: up the lane north of the village, west over fields to Fulbrook, back along a quiet road, then down a wooded valley to Widford's lone church and along the Windrush to the Mitford graves. About a third is on lanes. From Burford, Burford and the Windrush valley is a 6-mile loop from the free Guildenford car park that drops to Widford and returns along the river.

Food and drink

The Swan Inn at Swinbrook, listed as probably mid eighteenth-century, stands by the bridge with the old mill beside it, and it calls Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, its inspirational landlady. It serves lunch and dinner every day from local produce, Swinbrook beef among it, and has rooms in the stables and a riverside cottage; book, as its hours shift with the season. The Three Horseshoes at Asthall, whose innkeepers, the pub says, shod travellers' horses from 1726, opens every day from 10am to 11pm, cooks pub food with Daylesford vegetables and wood-fired pizza in the garden in summer, and has six rooms upstairs.

On the A40 above Asthall, by the Asthall Barrow roundabout, is the Farmer's Dog, which its own website titles 'Jeremy Clarkson's proper British pub' and which opened on 23 August 2024. It is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 11pm and on Sundays to 10.30pm, closed on Mondays, with a butcher and bottle shop and a Diddly Squat farm shop beside it; tables can be booked. Our guide to Cotswold film and TV locations covers it, and the Swan's part in Downton Abbey: Experience Oxfordshire, and a 2014 Glamour review that the inn carries on its own website, both place Sybil and Branson's elopement there.

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When to come

May and June, when Asthall Manor's garden has opened in recent years and the river meadows are dry. The churches and the walk work in any season, but the riverside path floods in winter, and walkers reported the Burford meadows under water in January and February 2026. Swinbrook's RiverDay, the village fête on Long Meadow with a raft race and a tug of war across the Windrush, was held on 14 June 2025, according to the parish council, which has not published a later date. Sunday lunch fills both pubs, so book.