West Adderbury has an unusually high number of historic buildings, many of which are officially listed, which means that the building has been placed on a list maintained by Historic England and cannot be demolished, extended, or altered without special permission from the local planning authority.

The vast majority of West Adderbury’s listed buildings are constructed from ironstone, a sedimentary rock with a high proportion of iron.  Ironstone is whitish when initially quarried, but after oxidation with air becomes a warm, reddish colour. Often, ironstone contains fossilised shells, deposited in the sands of a warm, shallow sea that covered this region during the Jurassic Period, around 190 million years ago.

West Adderbury had its own ironstone beds, located to the south of what was Adderbury Station.  A tramway for carrying the quarried stone ran south from the station, under the bridleway which runs to Paper Mill Cottages and on to the working face by the Oxford Road.

Our local listed buildings are shown on the map below, and separately by street.  It’s easy to see how their distribution reflects the unique, dispersed nature of the West Adderbury settlement.