Banbury
A handsome market town on the River Cherwell, about half an hour from Well Cottage, with a fine cross, a canalside museum and one of the best regular markets in north Oxfordshire.
A handsome market town on the River Cherwell, about half an hour from Well Cottage, with a fine cross, a canalside museum and one of the best regular markets in north Oxfordshire.
Banbury has been a market town since the Middle Ages, and it still feels like one: purposeful, unhurried and centred on trade. The famous Cross, rebuilt in Victorian times on the spot immortalised by the nursery rhyme, stands at the meeting of the old roads, and from there the town spreads outward through handsome streets of local ironstone and warm brick. The Oxford Canal curves quietly through the centre, passing the Banbury Museum (free to enter and well worth an hour) and Tooley's Boatyard, one of the oldest working dry docks in the country and still repairing narrowboats much as it has done for over two hundred years. Fine churches punctuate the skyline, the pubs have character, and the canal towpath makes for easy, level walking between bridges.
From Well Cottage the drive takes around thirty minutes via the M40, making Banbury a natural choice for a morning's shopping or a long lunch. The open-air market on Thursdays and Saturdays is one of the liveliest in the region, with stalls selling everything from local cheeses and seasonal vegetables to household goods and flowers. Castle Quay, the waterfront development beside the canal, adds a handful of high-street names and places to eat. If the weather is kind, a walk along the towpath before or after is the perfect way to earn a second cup of coffee. Banbury also serves as a useful gateway to the wider countryside: Broughton Castle, the Wroxton estate and the rolling hills north of the Cherwell valley are all close by.
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.