The mansion torn down and rebuilt grander

The Masons rebuilt a patchwork Georgian house from scratch

In 1904, workmen tore down the Georgian house that had stood here since the 1770s. It had grown patchwork over the decades. Charles Barry added a floor in the mid-1800s. Owen Jones added another in the 1870s. None of that survived.

In its place, the Mason family built something bigger. They hired Ernest George, a fashionable architect of the day, to design a new mansion in a style borrowed from Elizabethan and Jacobean great houses. Work finished in 1908. The result was a three-story limestone house built in an H shape. The porch bore a coat of arms. The garden front carried its own stone crest.

The estate ran itself like a small town. It had its own electric generator, its own gasworks, its own water supply. A private telephone line connected the main house to the stables and outbuildings scattered across the grounds. You can still see some of them close by. The Eynsham Hall, Former Game Larder Approximately 60 Metres North East went up in 1883. So did the dairy. The architect Charles Henry Howell built them before the big rebuild even began.

Mothers gave birth here while airmen rested between missions

By 1940, the hunting parties were gone. War had emptied London's maternity wards, and Eynsham Hall took the overflow. Expectant mothers were evacuated here from the city, and the Hall became a place to give birth away from the bombing.

One of the babies born in that ward was Anthony J. Batten, later a Canadian artist. He came into the world inside a house built for shooting parties, in the middle of a war neither he nor the house had chosen.

The Hall took on a second wartime role at the same time. American airmen knew it as the "flak shack," a place to rest between missions. The American Red Cross ran the program. Officers played bridge, read, and knocked snooker balls around rooms once hung with oak paneling for a country squire.

When the war ended, the mothers and airmen left, and the Home Office moved in. From 1946, Eynsham Hall trained police recruits instead of hosting hunting parties or sheltering the displaced.

A Roman villa of sixty rooms was raised and buried

Long before the Masons rebuilt their mansion, the ground itself was being rebuilt for new owners. What became the North Leigh Roman villa with underlying Iron Age settlement started as an Iron Age farming settlement. People worked this stretch of the Evenlode Valley in huts and enclosures.

By the 2nd century AD, Roman builders had raised a courtyard villa over it. It grew to sixty rooms, with nineteen mosaic floors laid across its halls. It stood for two centuries before it was abandoned and buried under soil.

It stayed hidden until 1813, when the antiquarian Henry Hakewill dug it up and exposed the mosaics to daylight again. Archaeologists returned in the 1970s to dig it out properly. Half a mile north of the hamlet of East End, the villa's floors are still there to walk on.

The Perrott family built a vault for their dead

Inside St Mary's Church in the village, the Perrott family built themselves a resting place to match their standing. As lords of the manor, they added an Italianate chapel to the north aisle between the 1690s and 1723.

The chapel held a vault for the Perrott and Musgrave dead. Brass plates line its walls, pulled from coffins that had rotted where they lay. James Perrott and his kin were not content to be buried in the churchyard like everyone else. They built a room for it, the way their descendants would later build a mansion instead of living in an old one.

A Saxon tower outlasted the nave built beside it

The oldest thing standing on this ground had already been rebuilt once, centuries before any Perrott or Mason arrived. The tower of St Mary's Church went up around 1050, in the last years before the Norman Conquest.

It was built onto an Anglo-Saxon nave that stood just to its west. That nave did not last. By the 12th century, it had been abandoned, and the arch connecting it to the tower was blocked with stone. The tower itself kept standing regardless, absorbed into whatever church was rebuilt around it over the next thousand years.

A football club has played on the estate since 1908

The Hall's grounds gave a home to more than mothers and airmen and police cadets. In 1908, the same year the new mansion was finished, a group of local men formed North Leigh F. C. and began playing on land within the estate.

The club rose and fell with the decades. It won league titles through the 1950s and again through the 1980s, then climbed into higher divisions through the 1990s and 2000s. In 2022, a late change in the standings pulled North Leigh into a play-off it had not expected to reach. The team won it and earned promotion. Three years later, in 2025, they finished bottom of their division and were sent back down.

The club still plays in Eynsham Park, inside the grounds the Hall has always kept.