The Hill (west): Nos 178, 180, 182

These three separate houses are probably all of 17th-century origin. No. 178 (right) is probably the 'little new-built house' mentioned in a will of 1684, its site carved from a wide open space called Cowpen Close, which led to the open fields and cattle pen. The stone-mullioned windows with drip-moulds are part of the original building, though they would then have had smaller pieces of glass in lead cames (strips). Twentieth-century alterations include the door, a rear extension, and a new brick chimney stack. No. 180 is of similar date, with sash windows inserted probably in the 18th century and replaced in the late 19th or 20th (since they have 'horns'). Stone infill around the ground-floor windows shows that they were originally wider (probably casements), while the swept dormers suggest an earlier thatched roof. Nineteenth-century occupants included agricultural labourers, shoemakers, and possibly (at No. 180) a shopkeeper.

No. 182, also mid 17th-century, has a central-passage plan, its roof possibly raised later to allow for taller first-floor windows. In the 19th century it was subdivided among 3 households which included agricultural labourers, laundresses, and slaters or plasterers. The windows reflect the division: to the left are 17th-century stone-mullioned casements and a canted bay window, and to the right a 19th-century Yorkshire or sliding sash. In the mid 20th century it was briefly a lodging house for female trainees working at the Bay Tree Hotel in Sheep Street.

See: Oxfordshire Record Office, MS Wills Oxon. 67/2/4 (Nos. 178 and 182); RH Gretton, The Burford Records (1920) 330–2, 346, 447, 563 (No. 182); Listed Building Description; N Pevsner, Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (1974),  513