The Lady Tanfield Ghost in a Bottle: Burford’s Fiery Coach

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 26, 2026 · How we verify

Of all the stories attached to this Cotswold wool town, the one that sticks is the Lady Tanfield ghost: a flaming coach carrying a hated judge and his wife over the rooftops, and a spirit finally corked into a glass bottle and dropped into the river. Burford sits on the River Windrush in the West Oxfordshire district of Oxfordshire, about 18 miles west of Oxford and 22 miles southeast of Cheltenham, and it is often called the gateway to the Cotswolds. The name itself is plain enough: it comes from the Old English burh, a fortified town or hilltown, and ford, the crossing of a river.

Quick orientation. Parish population at the 2011 Census: 1,422. Two miles from the Gloucestershire boundary. Its most notable building is the Church of St John the Baptist, a Grade I listed Church of England parish church. In April 2009 Forbes magazine ranked Burford sixth in its list of Europe’s most idyllic places to live, which tells you something about the volume of visitors on a summer weekend.

Sir Lawrence Tanfield and the Coach That Burned Over Burford

Local legend tells of a fiery coach carrying the judge and local landowner Sir Lawrence Tanfield of Burford Priory and his wife, flying around the town and bringing a curse upon anyone who sees it. That is the legend, and it should be read as legend. What is on the record is the reason the couple were loathed. Tanfield and his second wife, Elizabeth Evans, are known to have been notoriously harsh to their tenants.

The writer Ross Andrews has offered a workable explanation for the sighting itself, speculating that the apparition may have been caused by a local tradition of burning effigies of the unpopular couple, a custom that began after their deaths. Burning straw figures paraded through a small town at night is a plausible seed for a story about a coach on fire, and it is worth noting that the legend grew where the grievance was real.

The Corked Bottle in the River Windrush

The visitations were reportedly ended when local clergymen trapped Lady Tanfield’s ghost in a corked glass bottle during an exorcism and cast it into the River Windrush. The detail that gives the tale its long life is what came afterwards: during droughts, locals would fill the river from buckets to make sure the bottle did not rise above the surface and free the spirit.

There is no documentary record of the exorcism, no named clergyman, no date. It survives as folklore, and Burford has a claim on that subject anyway. The folklorist and writer Katharine Mary Briggs, who lived from 1898 to 1980, lived in the town.

Burford Priory, from Augustinian Hospital to Private House

The house at the centre of the Tanfield story has had a long run of owners. Burford Priory is a country house standing on the site of a 13th-century Augustinian priory hospital. An Elizabethan house was built there in the 1580s, incorporating remnants of the older building, and it was remodelled in Jacobean style, probably after 1637, by which time the estate had been bought by William Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons in the Long Parliament.

After 1912 the house and later the chapel were restored for the philanthropist Emslie John Horniman, MP, by the architect Walter Godfrey. From 1949 the Priory housed the Society of the Salutation of Mary the Virgin, a community of Church of England nuns, which in 1987 became a mixed community including Church of England Benedictine monks as numbers declined. The community relocated in 2008 and sold the property. It is now a private dwelling, so do not plan a visit. A Time Team excavation there in 2010 turned up pottery sherds from the 12th or 13th century.

Three Levellers Shot in the Churchyard, 17 May 1649

Burford’s grimmest documented episode has nothing supernatural about it. In 1649 the parish church was used as a prison during the Civil War, holding the New Model Army Banbury mutineers. Some of the 340 prisoners left carvings and graffiti, which still survive inside the church and can be looked at today.

On 17 May 1649 three soldiers who were Levellers were executed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell in the churchyard, following a mutiny that had started over pay and the prospect of being sent to fight in Ireland. Corporal Church, Private Perkins and Cornet Thompson were the key leaders. After a brief court-martial they were put against the churchyard wall and shot. The remaining soldiers were pardoned. Each year, the weekend nearest to the mutiny is commemorated in the town as Levellers Day.

Battle Edge, the Golden Dragon and the 1814 Sarcophagus

Malmesbury and other chroniclers record a battle between the West Saxons and Mercians at Burford in 752. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it briefly: Cuthred, king of the West Saxons, fought at Burford against Aethelbald king of the Mercians and put him to flight. In the telling, the Mercian standard-bearer Aethelhum, who carried the flag bearing a golden dragon, was killed by the lance of his Saxon rival. William Camden, writing between the 16th and 17th centuries, described Cuthred taking the standard, a portraiture of a golden dragon.

Camden also recorded that in his day the town still marked the anniversary: “There has been a custom in the town of making a great dragon yearly, and carrying it up and down the streets in great jollity on St John’s Eve”. The field traditionally claimed as the battle site is still called Battle Edge, and a dragon still goes down the High Street, now as part of the primary school fete procession each summer.

The other relic of that ground is stranger. According to the Reverend Francis Knollis’ account, on 21 November 1814 a large freestone sarcophagus was found near Battle Edge, roughly 0.91 metres below ground, weighing about 810 kg, with the feet pointing almost due south. The interior measured 1.8 metres long and 0.66 metres wide. It held human remains along with portions of a leather cuirass studded with metal nails, the skeleton reportedly well preserved because air had been excluded. The coffin is now kept in Burford churchyard, near the west gate.

Walking the High Street: What There Is to See

Burford is an open town, not a paid attraction, and the ghost story has no ticketed venue attached to it. The church is the obvious first stop for the mutineers’ graffiti and for the merchants’ guild chapel, the memorial to Henry VIII’s barber-surgeon Edmund Harman with its South American Indian figures, and the Kempe stained glass. The author J. Meade Falkner, best known for Moonfleet, is buried in the churchyard.

Midway along the High Street stands the Tolsey, once the focal point of trade in a town that mattered for wool between the 14th and 17th centuries, and now a museum. The centre also holds 15th-century houses and the baroque-style townhouse that is now Burford Methodist Church. A few bells cast by the Neale family, who ran a foundry here in the 17th century, are displayed in the parish church, no longer rung.

Whether a fiery coach ever crossed the sky above the High Street is not something the record can settle. The bottle in the Windrush, if you take the story at its word, is still down there.

Address: Burford, Oxfordshire, England

See Burford for Yourself

Sources

• Area: Burford (Parish): Key Figures for 2011 Census: Key Statistics
• Best Burford, Places To Visit in the Cotswolds
• Burford Church: Burford Church
• Tolsey Museum Burford
• The Story of Burford: How to do local history
• Wikipedia: Burford

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