Not only an important building in its own right, this house also conveys a strong impression of a parson’s life in former days. A rectory was first built here at the same time as the elaborate Norman church a few yards away (and the earlier half of the house still is a rectory, modernised by us). In about 1500, a smart new wing was added, and in it are the handsome rooms that you can occupy. Some of them were later panelled and given new fireplaces. In the parlour, probably added when J. C. Buckler worked on the house in 1857, is a tremendous Latin inscription running round the room. It says, in tall Gothic letters, ‘For we know that, if our earthly house were destroyed, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’. Here, within its dark temporal panels, you may sit looking down the garden, as did many a scholarly leisured parson, pondering his sermon as he watched the Thames slide by.

The staircase, in a square tower of its own, is strong and plain, and reminiscent of staircases in Oxford colleges nearby. The house is entered straight off the pavement of Mill Lane, giving no hint of the long garden on the other side running down to the river at the tail of Iffley lock. The contrast is very agreeable.

View our history sheet for this Landmark

Sleeps: 6