The Crown & Thistle

The cobbled courtyard under the old wisteria is the middle of everything at the Crown & Thistle in Oxfordshire. It’s where the whole group gathers, and where the trestle tables go once the lamps are lit. You marry in the Barn alongside it, stone walls and timber overhead, a room that needs nothing hung on it, and the same room takes the dinner and then the dancing once the colour comes up in the evening. The bedrooms are worth getting into early as well. Bold wallpaper, antiques, a roll-top bath, so the morning pictures already have character in them before anyone is dressed. Being in the middle of a market town sounds like a limitation and isn’t. Give us twenty minutes and we’ll walk you round to the abbey ruins and the meadows, and you get stone arches, worn steps and old garden greenery that look nothing like the inn you left. Finish under the lit carriage archway out front, because the warm light comes straight down onto the two of you.