The Barringtons and Windrush

What to see

Great Barrington lies along the edge of Barrington Park. The house behind it was built in 1736 to 1738 for Charles Talbot, Lord Chancellor to George II, after a fire damaged the old manor house in 1736; Historic England says it is reputedly by William Kent, though more likely by Francis Smith of Warwick, and lists it Grade I. Edward Rhys Wingfield extended it in 1870 to 1873. It is private, and you see it from the road only: the gate piers, the long wall and the park through the clairvoyee, the listed gap in the wall made for looking through.

St Mary's, at the park's edge, is Grade II*. The chancel arch is late twelfth century, the nave arcade early thirteenth, and the panelled ceiling is early sixteenth century. The monuments are the thing: a limestone effigy of Captain Edmund Bray, who died in 1620, at the west end of the north aisle; a large marble monument to Jane and Edmond Bray, who died in 1711 and 1720; and in the chancel Joseph Nollekens's monument to Mary, Countess Talbot, who died in 1787.

Little Barrington, across the river, is the smaller of the two and the one the Strongs lived in: cottages round a green, with St Peter's above. The church is Grade I for its late twelfth-century doorway, deeply cut with chevron and lozenge, and the carved tympanum of Christ in Majesty between two angels now set in the wall. The two villages are joined by Strong's Causeway, the raised road across the water meadows which local tradition says the mason Thomas Strong built at the end of the seventeenth century, when floods often cut one village off from the other.

Windrush village

Windrush, a mile and a half west, is the smallest and the best. Four roads meet at a triangle of grass, the cottages round it are mostly eighteenth century, and St Peter's church, Grade I, has a twelfth-century south doorway carved with a double row of beaked heads, the bird and beast faces that bite the roll of a Norman arch. The churchyard holds a set of carved chest tombs, two groups of them listed Grade II* in their own right, to the Trinders, the Newmans and the Masons.

The quarries

Barrington stone went to New College, Oxford, in 1396 to 1397, to St George's Chapel at Windsor and the Divinity School at Oxford in the fifteenth century, to Hampton Court and Christ Church in the sixteenth, to the Sheldonian Theatre in the seventeenth and to Blenheim Palace in the eighteenth, and Windrush supplied St George's in 1478. The masons who ran the trade were the Strongs: Timothy Strong moved to Little Barrington early in the seventeenth century, his son Valentine worked the quarries from 1632 until he died in 1662, and Thomas Strong, who did not live here, owned pits at Little Barrington from which he took stone for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. In the nineteenth century the stone was mined underground; the mines had closed by the early twentieth century and the last open quarries by 1961. Our story why Cotswold stone is golden has the quarries here among the others.

An afternoon here

Leave the car at the Fox and walk up through Great Barrington, past the park gates to St Mary's, about half an hour there and back. Cross the river on Strong's Causeway to Little Barrington and climb the green to St Peter's for the doorway and the tympanum. Drive or walk the lane west to Windrush for the beakheads, and come back to the Fox for the garden by the water. Allow three hours with the churches.

Walks

None of our walks starts here yet. Public footpaths follow the Windrush between the Barringtons and Windrush village, and past Windrush the river runs into the National Trust's Sherborne estate; we have not walked them and will write them up when we have. From Burford, Burford and the Windrush valley goes the other way, downstream to Widford.

Food and drink

The Fox (opens in a new tab) at Great Barrington is the village pub, and it is a good one: one of Donnington Brewery's own inns, on the bank of the river, open before 1835, with a log burner in winter, a restaurant on the water and a garden for summer. The King family, who also run the Angel at Burford, took it on in 2022 and refitted its seven bedrooms. It opens every day from 8.30am to 11pm; food is served from midday to 2.30pm and 6pm to 9pm from Monday to Thursday, all day from midday to 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays, and a Sunday lunch from midday to 7pm. Up on the A40 at the Barringtons turn, the Inn for All Seasons is a hotel with a restaurant serving from midday to 8pm, 8.30pm on Fridays and Saturdays, and twelve rooms, eight in the inn and four in a mews coach house; its own site says dogs are welcome in the inn and the mews rooms. Windrush has no pub.

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When to come

Any season, because almost nobody comes. Spring is best for the river meadows, which flood in winter; autumn for the Fox's fire. There are no events to plan round in any of the three villages. Sunday lunch at the Fox is the one busy hour of the week, so book it.