Witney Lake and Cogges

The Witney Lake and Cogges walk is a 3.2-mile (5.1km) circular walk from Le Touquet Square in Witney, down the River Windrush to Witney Lake and back by the old manor of Cogges. It is easy and flat and takes about an hour and a quarter. Cogges Manor Farm has a café near the end.

Witney Lake and the meadows

The southern half of the walk crosses Witney Lake and Country Park, looked after by Witney Town Council, a Local Nature Reserve since March 2025 and a Local Wildlife Site since June 2026. The lake is a flooded gravel pit, dug in the mid-1980s for gravel used in building the Witney bypass, the A40; between the streams of the Windrush beside it lie a traditional hay meadow, once grazed by cattle, and wet grassland. A study by the Lower Windrush Valley Project and Pond Conservation found 110 species of birds here, and one of the meadows is named after the snipe.

The south end of the lake is kept as a nature reserve, and the north end for fishing and picnics, with accessible picnic benches. The lakeside footpath is 1.1 miles round, with quarter-mile markers to measure a walk or a run, and information points and rubbing boards along the way describe the wildlife. The council does not allow swimming or paddling anywhere in the lake, because of its unpredictable depths and unstable banks, and its information panel asks you to keep dogs under close control when walking through the fields.

Cogges

Cogges, on the east side of the town, is the walk's second half: a Grade I church, a priory and a thirteenth-century manor farm you can visit. Its church of St Mary is late twelfth and early thirteenth century and remodelled around 1330 to 1340, with a north chapel probably of the 1340s, which has three fine carved heads above its early fourteenth-century windows. Next to it, the Priory, now the vicarage, dates from about 1150 to 1180 and mainly from about 1230 to 1250, and keeps a thirteenth-century hall.

Manor Farmhouse was built in the mid-thirteenth century for the de Grey family, remodelled for the Popes in the sixteenth century and refronted for the Blakes around 1680. William Blake of Cogges put up the clock turret on Witney's Butter Cross in 1683, with his name on it. The farm buildings round the yard are listed too: the ox byre keeps a rare roof of bundle thatch, faggots of wood bound with withies, and the dairy has DAIRY painted above its door around 1800.

Cogges Manor Farm is open to visitors, with the house, farm animals, walled garden, orchard and adventure playground in about 17 acres, the Cogges Kitchen café and free parking. A day ticket in 2026 is £12 for adults and £9 for children aged 3 to 16; from 12 October a grounds-only ticket is £7.50 for adults and £4.50 for children, and from 2 November the farm opens daily 9.30am to 1pm on grounds-only tickets. The café opens 9am to 4.30pm, closing at 3.30pm from 1 November. Dogs on a lead are welcome around the farm and in the café, but only assistance dogs in the Manor House. Our guide to the Cotswolds with children includes it.

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What walkers report

The A40 runs between the town and the lake, and the walk passes under it on the way out and back over it on the return, so expect traffic noise near it. The town council says the river often floods the meadows in winter, with the scrapes holding water late into spring, so the paths there can be wet and muddy. The return follows Stanton Harcourt Road for a stretch, the lane south to the village where, in 1718, lightning killed two harvest workers, as our story on the lovers of Stanton Harcourt tells.

Food, parking and staying

Parking near the start is free, because West Oxfordshire District Council keeps all its car parks free, among them Woolgate and Marriotts Walk in the town centre; levels one to six of Marriotts Walk allow four hours, enough for the walk. The Cogges Kitchen café at Cogges Manor Farm is on the way back. In the town, the Blue Boar on Market Square is a seventeenth-century coaching inn with rooms, and the Fleece looks down Church Green to Witney's other St Mary's; our guide to where to stay in Witney has more.

Witney has no railway station; the nearest are Hanborough and Oxford. The S7 bus runs from Oxford by Woodstock and Hanborough station to Witney about every half hour in the day.

Walks nearby

The closest walk to this one is upstream: Minster Lovell and Crawley is a 3.7-mile loop by the Windrush to the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall. Further up the valley, the walk from Swinbrook to Fulbrook and Widford passes the Mitford graves, and the Windrush walks from Burford go on into the Oxfordshire Cotswolds.