A large farm, with a small number of tenants and servile labour, with its barns, out buildings and primitive housing, may have been the original iteration of what is now the village of Wyck Rissington, but despite that it was thought worthy of its own parish church by the 12th century.

The church is at the top of the village, and we will visit it shortly, but meanwhile the wonderful wide village green, flanked by two lines of lovely old houses, deserves our attention.

The single road cuts through the middle of the village and runs from the Fosse way to the Barrington Road. It’s so quiet that Ross and I were able to walk down the middle of the road all the way through the village. This was lucky actually, as there had been so much rain during the winter of 2023/24.

Most of the houses in the village date from the 17th and 18th centuries, with a few additions from the 19th century. All the signs of classic Cotswold buildings are here. Most, if not all the houses are roofed in either Cotswold stone tiles or occasionally in Welsh slate and are built of what is called Rubble Cotswold stone, (this derogatory sounding description simply means un-cut stone, differentiating it from the Ashlar, or cut stone, from which the grand houses in the region tend to be built.)

As I mentioned earlier the village has neither spring or river in its close vicinity, so in the 19th century a few houses had water piped from the springs above the village, and eventually, in the early 20th century, water was piped to a fountain tap on the green. It wasn’t until 1954 that mains water was finally provided.