Chipping Norton

Chipping Norton is a working market town before it is anything pretty, and the locals call it Chippy and leave it at that. The Chipping in the name is the old word for a market, and a market is what built it; it stands on the highest ground in Oxfordshire, and St Mary's, its wool church, was largely rebuilt around 1485 on the profits of the trade.

The landmark you see first, coming in from the west, is Bliss Mill, a tweed factory of 1872 with a great domed chimney that looks more like a country house than a mill. It made cloth until 1980 and is flats now. North of the town stand the Rollright Stones, a circle older than almost anything else in the county.

In recent years the town lent its name to a set, the well-connected media and political crowd who keep houses in the country round about and were written about a good deal for a while. The town itself carried on much as before.

That is the north Oxfordshire Cotswolds in a sentence: real towns getting on with their week, and behind the drystone walls, a good deal of money that would rather not be discussed. Chippy knows the difference and keeps it.