The Pest House Fields are so called because they once housed a “Pest House”, administered by the Deddington foeffees. The Pest House, now demolished but still remembered by older parishioners, was a kind of one-room isolation unit for villagers suffering from contagious diseases, including small pox. A stone hut, latterly with a corrugated iron roof, it stood in the valley at the bottom of the fields, which at one point contained allotments.

The Pest House.
Drawing by HE Robinson.

No known historical account survives of how the sick parishioners were cared for. But one notable vicar of Deddington, the Rev Cotton Risley, records in his diary ushering one family and then another stricken with small pox to the Pest House in 1837. One member of the second family, four-year-old Charles Payne, died there. Although it was used for scarlet fever victims as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, thereafter the Pest House fell into disuse and disrepair. In 1984 the DCE trustees agreed, at the suggestion of the farmer who leased the fields, to demolish the ruins and sell the stone. Nothing can be seen of it now and the whole of the fields is given over to arable farming and pasture, which contributes to the charity’s income.