Sheep Street (south): No. 27 (Waynes Close)

A house here may have been occupied in 1652 by Leonard Mills, carrier (taxed in 1662 on 5 hearths), and owned in 1685 by Robert Aston (of the Bull). The style of the windows and gables suggests a date c.1620, but the building was radically rebuilt c.1907 for Canon W.C. Emeris, rector of Burford, by Groves the builders. The leaded lights are certainly 20th-century, and replaced stonework under the right-hand window suggests there was once a doorway here, made redundant when the present entrance was created in the east gable wall. A drawing of 1821 by J.C. Buckler shows the range (without its front gables) extending eastwards to abut No. 25, with a doorway or passageway on the site of the present gateway. Map evidence confirms that the buildings were separate by 1881, however, and the drawing may be fanciful (see Calendars). Certainly No. 27's east gable-wall shows no obvious scarring.

Nineteenth-century occupants included a baker and an agricultural labourer. A barn at the rear was used for folk dancing in the early 20th century, and in 1929 was bought by Mrs Conger Vanamee of New York for conversion into a house; in the 1940s–70s the folklorist Katherine Briggs lived there. The name Waynes Close was coined by 1920. 

See: RH Gretton, The Burford Records (1920),  449, 458; Hearth Tax 216; N Pevsner, Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (1974), 521; Gretton, M S, Burford Past and Present (1945), 110, 145