Sitwell stirs it up

William visits The Boxing Hare in Chipping Norton

I’ve got a thing about the noise of traffic in the countryside. In a city such as London, I have no problem. In fact, I have very early memories – aged about four – of lying in bed at the top of our house on the rather busy top end of Ladbroke Grove, listening to it after I went to bed. I found the hum of cars reassuring. I loved to watch the shards of light as they came across the top of the curtains and darted across the ceiling.

But away from towns and cities, I have this conviction that if you’re going to be in the countryside then you mustn’t be able to hear traffic.

These days, obsessives such as me need to be fewer on the ground, or we would all go mad. When I stay with friends in the countryside, however large or small their house, I judge its quality on whether or not you can hear the road.

So when I went to eat at the Boxing Hare, I did so with trepidation. It used to be called The Masons Arms and I had often spotted it, as it’s on the A361 between Banbury and Chipping Norton. Indeed, there is no actual address for the place, no number. It’s just near Swerford on the thundering A361, so you can’t miss it.

Off we went for dinner, on a busy road that cuts through the Oxfordshire Cotswolds. Doubtless this place, encased in brown Cotswold stone, was once an inn, a place to stop, rest or change horses. But the noise of hooves, of wooden wheels on rough road, are these days but a feast for the imagination.

Of course, the reality is that, in winter at night inside this cosy pub, with the windows closed (unless you go round asking everyone to stop talking and you ask them to turn the music off ), you can’t hear anything. And with its tasteful wooden furniture, attractive bar, stags’ heads, and fridge used for ageing beef, it really is a place of immaculate and sensible hospitality. I say this first because the moment we were shown to our table, our waiter went over to a side table, carved us some bread and brought it along with butter and water and he then took our drinks order. It always baffles me as to why more places don’t do this. There is no better way to shut customers up for a while than by giving them things that have barely any cost which they can immediately shove into their faces. They understand this in the United States where, for example, almost anywhere you go to for breakfast, the staff will immediately sling coffee and water at you. Think of it the next time you sit in some place of barren idiocy, trying to wave at staff to attract their attention so you can ask them to bring you what more intelligent establishments do without asking.

We shared starters of ‘Twice baked cave aged Cheddar soufflé’ and ‘Classic Provençal fish soup’. The former was so deeply tasty that I forgave the lack of hyphens, but the fish soup lacked that depth of flavour I seek out in such a dish, which comes from a stock that has bubbled for hours in shells and bones and stuff.

But main courses were faultless. I shared a rib-eye with Alice that was joyfully charred, rested and juicy, and came with thick and crisp chips and delicious purple sprouting broccoli. Albert’s ‘Dry aged steak burger’ was similarly on point (if consistently ungrammatical) – superb meat, cooked by a chef who knows and cares. And we ended with an immaculate warm and oozing chocolate fondant.

Service was joyous and the Boxing Hare is a pub of well-lit, stylishly furnished excellence. And the traffic? What of it? A pox on such a whinge. A man must travel to find excellence, or he festers at home, albeit in blissful, rural silence.