You have to want to find it. Tucked down a narrow alley off Holywell Street, the Turf has been pouring pints since the fourteenth century. It's the kind of place where you settle into a walled garden with a glass of something local and lose track of the afternoon entirely.
Part of the charm is the approach. You duck through St Helen's Passage (a sliver of a walkway between Holywell Street and New College Lane) and suddenly there it is: low ceilings, stone walls, a jumble of small rooms that have been accumulating character for over six hundred years. Outside, a series of walled courtyards sits beneath the old city walls, each one a little world of its own. In summer they fill with sunlight and conversation; in winter, the pub lights them with heaters and the glow from the bar carries you through.
The beer list is genuinely good. They keep a rotating selection of real ales alongside the usual suspects, and the food is honest pub fare, nothing more, nothing less. Bill Clinton famously "didn't inhale" here as a Rhodes Scholar; Inspector Morse drank here in fiction; and generations of Oxford students have made it their local. None of that matters much when you're actually sitting there with a pint, though. What matters is that it feels like a secret, even when it isn't one. It's around 40 minutes from the cottage, and pairs well with an afternoon wandering the Bodleian, the covered market, or the college quads.
“Every time I go I forget quite how hidden it is. You turn down that alley half-convinced you've got it wrong, and then there's this perfect little pub waiting at the end.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.