The Hill (west): Nos 184-186

Until the 19th century this was a single house (as it still looks externally). The through-passage plan may have medieval origins, while the doorhead and a chimney-piece in No. 186 could be 16th-century. The rest seems 17th-century, though the first-floor mullion windows have been blocked. At some point the façade was 'pecked' to hold render. By 1607 this was part of the endowment of Burford Grammar School, and was leased in the 17th and 18th centuries to the Greenhills and Townsends (of whom one, in 1699, was a maltster). The dormers were perhaps added in the 19th century when it was two cottages, occupied (from the 1850s) by tradesmen and labourers.

Photo by Ann Atkinson, Oxfordshire Buildings Record

See: Listed Building Description; M Laithwaite, 'The Buildings of Burford', in A Everitt (ed), Perspectives in English Urban History (1973), 77–8; RH Gretton, The Burford Records (1920) 328, 330–2, 346, 518, 562–3