Woodstock town walk

The Woodstock town walk is an easy 1.1-mile (1.7km) loop round Woodstock from the stocks in Park Street, opposite the church, on pavements, lanes and a churchyard path. It passes 21 numbered buildings, from Hawksmoor's gate into Blenheim to the coaching inns, and pubs such as the Punchbowl. The leaflet gives no time; it is nearly level.

It comes from West Oxfordshire District Council's Woodstock Town Walk leaflet, and it is a loop through the streets rather than a countryside walk.

A town built for visitors

Woodstock grew up to serve the royal hunting park next door, and later Blenheim. The leaflet's history begins with the Norman kings' love of hunting. In the early twelfth century Henry I enclosed the park at Woodstock with a wall seven miles long, which the leaflet calls the earliest known park wall in England, and New Woodstock, the main part of the town, was laid out in the late twelfth century by Henry II, who bought land beside the park for inns to house his attendants. In 1704 the estate was granted to the Duke of Marlborough for his victory at Blenheim. In the 70 years that followed, many timber-framed houses in the town were rebuilt or given the symmetrical stone fronts that make it look Georgian today.

Park Street and the Woodstock Gate

Park Street, where the walk starts, runs west to the Woodstock Gate, the main entrance to Blenheim. It is lined with Georgian houses, many with the stone door hoods on iron brackets that the leaflet calls typical of Woodstock. The gate into Blenheim Palace was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1723; the leaflet says it was meant for the Oxford road until a smallholder refused to give up his land. Blenheim's palace and park are a World Heritage Site, and the palace is Winston Churchill's birthplace.

On the way back, Chaucer's House takes its name, the leaflet says, from the son of the poet, who had a house here. Its listing gives it medieval origins, a rebuilding in the late seventeenth century for Nicholas Baynton and a new front of about 1740. From the embankment above Oxford Street you can see the Octagon House, a converted chapel, and in the far distance the Column of Victory, about 41m high and topped by a statue of the first Duke of Marlborough.

The coaching inns

Oxford Street and Market Street still show the coaching age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with three old inns in a few hundred metres. The Marlborough Arms keeps its arched gateway and cobbled yard; its listing dates the front to about 1750, with earlier origins. The Feathers has a carved fourteenth-century figure on its wall. The Bear is a five-bay Georgian block with a central coach entrance, an earlier block of 1700 with a doorway carved with two bears fighting over grapes, and a smaller sixteenth-century gabled wing beyond.

The Town Hall was designed by Sir William Chambers in 1766, with an open market hall on the ground floor that was enclosed in 1898. In a niche on its south wall is a marble sundial, the near twin of the one on the church, which our story on the two Woodstock sundials explains.

High Street to the Hensington Gate

The walk's eastern end runs down the High Street and Oxford Road to Hawksmoor's second gate into Blenheim, the Hensington Gate. On the way, Brothertons was an ironmonger's from 1712 to 1980, with a two-storey bay window and a horseman carved above it. Opposite, 6 and 8 High Street, once one house, has 1710 on its rainwater head, Ye Anciente House at No 20, which the 2009 leaflet names as Harriet's Tearooms, is early seventeenth century with finely carved bargeboards, and No 28, Cromwell's House of about 1640, is where the leaflet says Cromwell supposedly stayed during the siege of Woodstock Manor.

Hope House on the corner of Hensington Road is listed Grade II*: its listing dates it to about 1708, built for Miles Parker in the Baroque style, and the leaflet says it may have been designed by Vanbrugh, the architect of Blenheim. Caroline Court was built in 1797 as almshouses for Caroline, Duchess of Marlborough. The Hensington Gate beyond it has flower baskets carved by Grinling Gibbons, and its massive piers were moved here in the 1770s.

The Cotswolds Info newsletter

Events, new places and the best of the season, about once a month. Unsubscribe at any time.

Leave this field blank

Your name

Your email address

Yes, send me the Cotswolds Info newsletter

Sign me up

Rectory Lane, the church and the stocks

The way back is by Rectory Lane and through the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene to the stocks. Cockpit Close on Rectory Lane stands on the site of an eighteenth-century cockfighting pit, later a glove factory demolished in 1961. The path through the churchyard shows the oldest parts of the church: a Norman south doorway with zigzag ornament and two thirteenth-century windows.

Back on Park Street, a blue plaque on No 5 recalls Edmund Hiorne, the town clerk in the Civil War, who had to beg forgiveness on his knees in the House of Commons for giving the town's armour to the Royalists. Across the street are the stocks, listed as seventeenth or eighteenth century, with four leg holes. The leaflet explains that a crime against another person put both feet in, and one against yourself, such as drunkenness, only one. The walk ends at Fletcher's House, which its listing dates to 1613 and 1614, built for Thomas Brown, an alderman, and refronted about 1795. It is now the Oxfordshire Museum, free and closed on Mondays, whose Woodstock gallery covers the town's glove making and the polished cut steel it was known for in the eighteenth century.

Food, drink and dogs

The walk passes most of the town's inns, so there is somewhere to eat at almost every corner. The Punchbowl on Oxford Street is a family-run Arkell's pub that calls itself super dog friendly, and the King's Arms on Market Street is a Fuller's hotel and restaurant. The leaflet says nothing about dogs, but the route keeps to streets and the churchyard path, so a lead is all a dog needs. For a night in the town, see our places to stay in Woodstock.

Parking, buses and paths

The council's Hensington Road car park is free, with 4-hour and 10-hour bays, and the leaflet's map marks parking near the route. The S3 bus from Oxford station stops outside Blenheim Palace roughly hourly, and the S7 links Woodstock with Oxford, Hanborough station and Witney.

The route is on pavements, lanes and the churchyard path, with a kissing gate and steps into the churchyard; the leaflet's alternative keeps to Rectory Lane and Park Street instead. The Woodstock Town Walk leaflet (opens in a new tab) has the map.

Longer walks into Blenheim

To go through the gates rather than past them, the 4.5-mile circuit of Blenheim's park from Bladon crosses the park by the Grand Bridge, though most of it needs a Park and Gardens ticket. The walk from Combe into Blenheim Park uses the park's public footpaths, past Fair Rosamund's Well and the lake.