Best gastro pubs with rooms in Oxfordshire

You can mess about in boats with a fishing rod, sip a pint of bitter in the sunshine or enjoy classic gastropub fare at this cheerful pub-with-rooms beside the Thames, with moorings that are free to guests.

On the outside, it looks like a chocolate box stone thatched pub, but that belies the funky interior of this Cotswold outpost of Justin and Charlotte Salisbury’s portfolio of Artist Residence properties in Brighton and London (see main entries) and Penzance (see Shortlist entry).

At the centre of a village at the foot of the Berkshire Downs, Martyn Reed and Catriona Galbraith’s 18th-century pub-with-rooms brims with community spirit.

The traditional village pub has been totally reinvented in Witney to include not just a restaurant and rooms, but also an upmarket deli.

‘Everyone’s idea of a Cotswold pub’, this 600-year-old inn is one of the oldest buildings in a picturesque village of thatched houses on the River Windrush.

Recently refreshed, this ‘delightful, friendly’ 17th-century coaching inn retains its authentic country air.

The very model of an olde worlde inn, with its flagstones, beams, blazing fires and jumbled interiors, The Lamb sits on the edge of a picture-perfect Cotswolds wool town, in the aptly named Sheep Street.

George Dailey’s honey-stone roadside inn, north of Oxford, is a popular village hub where locals come for the ‘excellent’ cooking – and where farther-flung guests settle in for ‘a very nice stay’.