Burford's High Street drops down a hill so steeply that you can see the roofs below you before you see the street, and it ends in a medieval stone bridge over the River Windrush. That one view is the whole reason to stop. The town grew rich on Cotswold wool in the Middle Ages, and the honey-coloured limestone houses with their tilted stone-tiled roofs, the big church and the arched doorways all date from that prosperity. Later it became a coaching stop between Oxford and the west, and some of the old inns still serve travellers.
History comes in a harder form too. In 1649, at the height of the Civil War's political chaos, Cromwell's troops crushed a mutiny of Levellers, the radical soldiers who wanted a wider vote and fairer laws, and locked several hundred of them in Burford church. Three leaders were shot against its wall the next morning, and the town still marks the day each May. Nothing in the quiet street prepares you for it. A few miles east, the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall stand on the riverbank, and the village of Swinbrook, where the Mitford sisters grew up, is also nearby.
The riding around here is gentle and good for a slow day. The A361 and the lanes along the Windrush valley run through small stone villages, past fields bounded by dry-stone walls and sheep in neat blocks. Surfaces are generally fine, though a lot of lorries use the A40 close by. Traffic in the street itself is slow on weekends, with coaches and visitors on foot, and parking a bike on the High Street is easy if you tuck it in among the cars. Go early and the town is almost empty, with the smell of baking drifting out of the bakery doors.
Burford is a small place of barely twelve hundred people, so for fuel, plan on Carterton, about six kilometres away, which is a proper town of sixteen thousand with supermarkets and filling stations. For food you are well served. There are tea rooms, pubs with log fires and a couple of delis, all of which cater to the sort of walkers and riders who arrive tired and wet in autumn.