The Oxenham Arms, South Zeal

The Oxenham Arms

South Zeal, Okehampton EX20 2JT

Grade C · TraditionTrading · checked Sept 2026

The Oxenham Arms claims 1100. No earlier record has been found.

Claimed

1100

First record

none found

Building

no single date

The building. Inn and former manor house of the Burgoyne family: late C16 to early C17, maybe earlier in parts, with C18, C19 and C20 modernisations; mostly large blocks of coursed granite ashlar under slate, formerly thatch (Historic England 1305729).

Haunted

Rooms

Food

Real ale

Beer garden

Dog friendly

The claim

A granite Dartmoor inn built around a prehistoric standing stone, which the national register records in its rear parlour, the Oxenham Arms traces itself to a 12th-century monastic house and claims a licence from 1477. The imposing former manor house keeps low beams, flagstones and great fireplaces, and CAMRA rates its interior of national historic importance. Dickens is said to have stayed.

What the records show

The claim is the inn's own: its history page describes Benedictine monks building a nine-room granite and oak monastery around the South Zeal menhir in the 12th century, and the manor being leased and licensed as an inn in 1477, and CAMRA repeats the 1477. The list entry has now been read, and it reaches neither date. Historic England, which listed the house Grade II* on 20 February 1952, calls it an inn, former manor house and home of the Burgoyne family, late 16th to early 17th century, maybe earlier in parts, with modernisations in the 18th, 19th and 20th: a courtyard-plan house of large coursed granite ashlar blocks under slate that was once thatch, with a two-storey gabled porch on a barrel-vaulted ceiling, granite-mullioned windows under hoodmoulds, a wide Tudor-arched carriageway whose labels carry the initials B and W, several 16th- and 17th-century doorframes, and a side-pegged jointed cruck truss over the kitchen wing. It also describes what the inn is best known for: an enormous upright slab of granite built into the inner wall of the rear parlour, which the surveyor reads as very probably a prehistoric standing stone that the house was built around. Nothing in the entry approaches the 12th century, and nothing in it reaches 1477 either. So the grade falls from B, which means fabric of the claimed age is documented, to C, and the 1477 is no longer recorded here as the earliest documented drinking on the site: it is a year the inn prints about a house the register dates a century later, and no licence, court roll or deed behind it has been read.

What to look for inside

A prehistoric megalith built into an inner wall, which the listing thinks the house was raised around
CAMRA two-star heritage pub
Claimed licensed since 1477

Visiting

The Oxenham Arms is in South Zeal, England, at South Zeal, Okehampton EX20 2JT. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

theoxenhamarms.com Directions in your maps app