The house they knocked down to build a bigger one
Eynsham Hall's terrace walls stand behind a Jacobethan mansion built in 1906-1908 by the Mason family, who demolished the Georgian hunting lodge that preceded it. Designed by Ernest George, the estate later served as a wartime maternity center and, from 1946, a Home Office police training centre, before its grounds passed partly to North Leigh F. C.
The Masons demolished a patchwork house to build anew
The house standing here now is not the house that stood here first. In 1906, the Mason family tore down a Georgian hunting lodge and started again. They hired Ernest George, one of the leading country house architects of the day, to build them something grander. He gave them a Jacobethan mansion in pale limestone, three stories high, laid out in the shape of an H. Above the porch he set a carved coat of arms, the family's claim in stone.
James Mason brought the family to the estate in 1866. The old house was still standing then. Earlier owners had already patched it and made it taller. Charles Barry had added a floor decades before. Owen Jones added another in the 1870s. By the time James Mason's descendants inherited it, the Georgian house was a patchwork of other men's additions. They chose to erase it rather than add to it again.
The new mansion took two years to finish, 1906 to 1908. It came with its own power station. It had its own gasworks. A telephone system ran to every outbuilding on the grounds. The former game larder and dairy, built decades earlier by Charles Henry Howell, still stand 420 feet from the main house. The Masons built themselves a self-contained world. It lasted less than forty years. Then the war came and took it over for other people entirely.
Evacuated mothers gave birth in the Masons' mansion
By 1940, the Masons' mansion was a maternity ward. Expectant mothers evacuated from London gave birth inside rooms built for house parties and shooting weekends. One of them was the mother of the Canadian artist Anthony J. Batten, born here that year. American airmen called the place the "flak shack," and came here for the quiet between missions. The Red Cross ran card games and snooker in rooms that had once hosted the county's hunting set.
The war ended, but the house never went back to being a private home in the old sense. In 1946 the Home Office took it over as a police training center, and it stayed that way for decades. The mansion the Masons built to announce a family's arrival spent most of its working life training strangers to leave it again.
The manor changed hands long before the Masons arrived
The mansion the Masons built did not appear on empty ground. Their claim to it went back only to 1866, and the manor's history stretched far longer than any single family's hold on it. In 1765 James Leigh-Perrott sold the manor to George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough. Before that, it had passed through the Crown, two rival abbeys, and a Norman baron who fought alongside the builder of Oxford Castle. The Domesday Book of 1086 named Roger d'Ivry as lord of the manor. He gave two-thirds of its tithes to a church inside Oxford Castle. Within a century they belonged to Osney Abbey. A slice went to a Cistercian house in Gloucestershire. Later the tenancy crossed the English Channel to an abbey in northern France. It then returned to an abbey in Hampshire. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536, the Crown seized it all again. Sir Thomas Pope picked up the manor in 1544. His heirs held it until 1660. The Perrott family followed, and gave their name to Perrotts Hill Farm, a mile from where the mansion now stands. By the time the Masons arrived, the ground under their new house had already changed hands more times than anyone living could count.
Elizabeth Wilcote bought her dead husbands eternal Mass
Long before any of that changing of hands, one family had already used the manor's church to fix their grief in stone. Elizabeth Wilcote lost two husbands and two sons. After 1439 she paid for a chantry chapel at St Mary's Church, North Leigh, so that priests would say Mass for the dead men forever. The chapel's fan vaulting is unusually fine for a parish church. Parts of its original fifteenth-century stained glass still sit in the windows. It was built as a private claim on a public building, a family buying permanence the only way they could.
The Perrotts sealed a burial vault beneath the church floor
Other families used the same church to hide rather than to be remembered. In 1690 James Perrott built a burial vault under the north aisle, sealed away from the congregation above. Local tradition later claimed the Perrotts had also buried treasure near their old mansion on Perrot's Hill. The family no longer held that land by the time the stories took hold. The vault was not: bodies kept out of sight beneath a floor that belonged to whoever held the parish.
A football club took root on the Masons' private ground
Some of the Masons' grounds eventually left the family's control on purpose. North Leigh F. C. was founded in 1908, the same year the new mansion was finished, and set up its pitch inside the estate. The club has played there ever since, through leagues and promotions and relegations, on ground the Masons once kept entirely to themselves.
A parish football club still plays inside walls a family built to keep the world out.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.