Barton Manor, before two adjoining houses replaced the outhouse on the left in 2019/2020.
Only the rear of the Manor, with no windows at ground-floor level, can be seen from the road

List entry for Barton Manor house: 1047369
List entry for Barton Manor garden wall: 1047370

Barton Manor is this tall, seventeenth-century building in Barton Village Road. It is built of ashlar, and has moulded eaves and cornice and three original attic dormers with gables. The west side was refronted in the late eighteenth century. There is a late-seventeenth-century staircase inside.

It is private property and the front cannot be seen, but there is this view of the more impressive side of the Manor in William Wilkinson, English Country Houses (1875).

It can also be seen in the detail below of the stained-glass window in St Andrew’s Church that is dedicated to Vashti de Montfort Wellborne, an actress who lived in Barton Manor from 1876 to 1930:

Barton Manor was numbered 9 Barton Village Road until it was renumbered as 7 in the 1950s.

The two pictures below shows thatched cottages with Barton Manor to the right (1) in about 1940 and (2) in the 1950s, and in both cases there are no windows at all in the side facing Barton Village Road, except for the dormer windows in the roof. To the right of Barton Manor is the Princes Castle pub, which closed in the 1980s and is now a private house.

The Gothic arch on the left of the above image is medieval

An early occupant of Barton Manor was probably John Boyce (1673–1755), who was Mayor of Oxford in 1722/3, 1727/8, and 1739/40. Although Thomas Hearne said that he was born in Headington Quarry, the distinction between Barton and Quarry would not have been so obvious when they were both at the east side of St Andrew's parish and there was no London Road to divide them; indeed Barton was included with Quarry rather than Old Headington in the first nineteenth-century censuses. Certainly it was Sir John Boyce’s widow, Sarah, who in 1759 advertised Barton Manor for sale after her husband’s death:

The Headington Rate Book of 1850 shows that Barton Manor was then owned by a Mr Herbert and let out to William Reynolds (the wood-engraver who collaborated with Orlando Jewitt). Its rateable value was then £7–10s, and its gross estimated rental £10. Reynolds is listed in the 1851 census as living at Barton Manor with his wife Martha Henrietta. She was the daughter of local landowner William Mott and had inherited a number of cottages in Barton Village Road. With them lived their eldest son, five-year-old son George, and one servant. George’s two younger siblings had already died at Barton Manor (William John at the age of two in 1849, and Martha Anne at the age of seven months in 1850); and young George himself was to die there in April 1855 when he was nine, allegedly after drinking water from the Bayswater Brook.

In 1856 the Reynolds family moved to London, where they had four more children.

By the time of the 1871 census, Barton Manor was occupied by the master butcher James Hedges and his first wife Emma: they were probably also the owners. Emma died in 1873, and in 1876 James Hedges married his second wife, the widow Mrs Annie Pether Wellborne (née Rogers), who had a 12-year-old daughter from her first marriage called Vashti de Montfort Wellborne. There were no children from this second marriage., The 1911 census shows James Hedges (74), now retired, living with Annie (62) and his stepdaughter Vashti (42) in Barton Manor. James Hedges died in 1925, Vashti de Montford Wellborne in 1930, and Mrs Annie Pether Hedges in December 1933.

There is no one listed as living in Barton Manor in Kelly's Directory of 1935 or 1936, and it then appears to have been let out: Frederick George Mullins is listed there in 1938 and 1940.

In October 1940 the bookseller & bibliographer (and possible spy) (Henry) Graham Pollard moved into Barton Manor, and he is listed there in Kelly's Directory from 1941 to 1976. In Within Living Memory: Recollections of Old Headington, Oxford, Pollard outlined the ownership of the house following Mrs Annie Pether Hedges' death:

Mrs Hedges ... left Barton Manor to a Mr Pether of Stowford Farm who was her or her husband's nephew. Mr Pether died about 1946 and left Barton Manor to a Miss Iris Munro who was manageress of the Golden Cross in the Cornmarket. She died about 1948 and left it to her nephew who sold it to Hall's Brewery.

Pollard died at the Radcliffe Infirmary on 15 November 1976.

The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) bought Barton Manor, and they carried out renovation works completed in 1992.

The plaque (right) on the side of the building commemorates this restoration.

The CPRE sold the house to private owners in 1994.