The tender purple spray on copse and briers!
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires
She needs not June for beauty's heightening,
Lovely all the time she lies, lovely to-night" - Thyrsis, Matthew Arnold.
"I wonder if anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speak" - WB Yeats.
"Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure" - Henry James.
"The clever men at Oxford
Know all there is to be knowed
But they none of them know one half as much
As Intelligent Mr Toad" - The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame.
It's always good to blood a new person into the cult of TADS and we'd not had that pleasure since Tina joined us for our Eastleigh to Winchester walk back in May. Much like Tina, Colin may be new to TADS but he's hardly an unfamiliar face. Like Tina, many of us have known him for the best part of thirty years. I think he's the first ever person who beat me at Trivial Pursuit. The git!
Also as a long time resident of Oxford and its environs he would prove invaluable in confirming, or refuting, my stories of the city and, in many cases, he'd be able to put some flesh on the bones of that very same, and very brief, potted history.
Pam and I had met in Victoria station at 1000hrs and caught the coach to Oxford where we met Colin, Adam, Teresa, Shep, Neil, Eamon, Bee, and Tina at Oxford station at noon and soon we were off along Botley Road to pick up the Thames Path at Osney Bridge (the bridge with the lowest headroom of any across the navigable Thames).
Soon, after a couple of picturesque bridges, the algae filled Fiddler's Stream flanked us to the right as the Thames did to our left leading us past Cripley Meadow Allotments before feeding into the Castle Mill Stream which makes up the southern border of the vast grazing land/floodplain that is Port Meadow.
These are the backwaters of the Thames where once stood a castle besieged in the winter of 1142 when Empress Matilda/Queen Maud, daughter and dispossessed heir of Henry I, lived there during her power struggle with King Stephen.
Port Meadow itself is beautiful. Cows of many colours mooched about, one taking a particular interest in a beached boat, and they were even joined by a small group of horses. It's said that Port Meadow has not been ploughed for 4,000 years and legend has it that our old friend Alfred the Great (having cropped up in both Wantage and Winchester he's becoming as much a feature of these walks as Graham Greene, Rupert Brooke, real ale, punctuation, and curry) gave Port Meadow to the Freemen of Oxford for helping him out against the Danes. Legend also claims that Alfred founded the city in the tenth century. Having died in 899 that seems unlikely.
In more recent history Lewis Carroll and the Reverend Robin Duckworth took a boat ride along the Thames (or Isis as some Oxonians prefer) with three little girls:- Lorina, Edith, and Alice Liddell. During the journey Carroll made up a story about Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. Further fantasties were lived out on Port Meadow during the eighties and nineties when it became a popular spot for raves and free festivals.
We carried along the Thames Path, stopping for photographs and for me to read the poems and quotes at the start of this piece on an upturned tree, until we reached a sign for asparagus (next left apparently, one for the HMHB fans) and, eventually, the ruins of Godstow Abbey.
Dating from 1133, Henry II's mistress, Rosamund Clifford, died here c1176 but her grave, in the grounds, is now lost. In 1539 the Second Act of Dissolution suppressed the abbey and it was converted into a family home before being irreparably damaged during the English Civil War. Locals used its stone for their new buildings.
When the German travel writer Paul Hentzner visited in 1612 he said, of Rosamund's grave, "here in a tomb lies a rose of the world, not a pure rose. She who used to smell sweet, still smells - but not sweet". I guess early 17c German humour doesn't translate, and hasn't aged, well.
We went to the pub. The first of two on this walk that have such illustrious histories they even have their own Wikipedia pages. The Trout Inn in Wolvercote doesn't just have a Wikipedia page though. It has a resident peacock. Krug. Krug wandered around showing off and posing for photos and even allowed Pam to feed him. His wings, his colours, spectacularly beautiful but his gnarled manky feet revealing him to be basically a pimped up chicken.
I shan't get aeriated about galliformes though. The Grade II listed pub itself crops up in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage, and, like many places round here, Inspector Morse. In 2001 Bill Clinton visited with his daughter, Chelsea, who, like her father before her, was then studying at University College, one of thirty-eight constituent colleges of Oxford University.
We'd be seeing more. But, first a pint. I wanted Oxford Gold (good to support the local brewers) but, alas, it was off so I took a Wainwright's and we sat by the side of the river as the sun poked its head out from behind the clouds for the first time all day. A pub garden, sunshine, a beer, friends, a peacock named Krug, for me a small slice of heaven on Earth.
On departing we headed through the quaint, yet practical looking, village of Wolvercote past two other tempting looking hostelries and on towards the Oxford Canal which we would take south back into Oxford proper. The Oxford Canal links Oxford with Bedworth in Warwickshire, completed in 1790 it's seventy-eight miles long (though the Oxford Canal Walk manages to add a bonus four miles to that) and is part of the E2 European long distance path which travels 3,010 miles from Galway to Nice. A project for the future perhaps!?
Integrated with both the Thames and the Grand Union Canal we saw pristine narrowboats, ones that looked ready to sink, and lots of cats. As we passed under a series of bridges we looked out at gardens that rolled gently down to the water and speculated how much use they actually got. Do people sit in these gardens with a book and a glass of wine or do they draw the curtains and watch Eastenders? A range of views was proffered. Not for the last time that day.
We passed by Burgess Field, Trap Grounds Allotments, and the other side of Port Meadow before we came off the canal near Jericho, stopped for a Twirl and a lottery ticket (!), and came out on Woodstock Road and our first college.
Saint Anne's isn't the most traditionally pretty college, architecturally speaking, but it has an interesting story. It began life as part of the Association for the Education of Women in 1878 as the first institution in Oxford to allow education of women. In 1979 it became co-ed and it's alumni include Susan Sontag, Polly Toynbee, Melanie Phillips, Kevin MacDonald, Helen Fielding, Edwina Currie, and Danny Alexander. I asked people to cheer for names they liked and boo those they didn't. I even thought of doing a quiz at the end of the walk but the look on Shep's face when I revealed I'd written five sides of A4 about the day suggested I was skating on thin ice as it was!
Next we passed St John's College, a men's college since its 1555 foundation it too became co-ed in '79 and its alumni include Tony Blair (boo), Alan Duncan, Angela Eagle, Kingsley Amis, Victoria Coren Mitchell (a cheer, from me at least), Evan Davis, Philip Larkin, Yannis Philippakis of the band Foals, Edward Maufe (who, as the architect responsible for Guildford Cathedral, I was surprised, even disappointed, nobody remembered), and the 18c agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull. Not the dude with mad eyes who stands on one leg playing the flute.
Inspector Morse, too, went to St John's - or he would've done if he was real. The nearby Lamb & Flag pub is owned and operated by St John's and the college was initially founded, by Sir Thomas White (a cloth merchant from Reading), with the aim of providing a source of educated Roman Catholic clerics to support Queen Mary's counter-reformation.
The sixteenth century was a hotbed of religious divide in England and, very close nearby, we can see the Martyrs Memorial. Not, as Colin and his Oxford friends like to cheekily tell tourists, the spire of an underground cathedral but an 1843 George Gilbert Scott (Albert Memorial, St Pancras railway station) design commemorating the Oxford Martyrs (Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Anglican bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley) who were tried for heresy and burnt at the stake near here in 1555/6 during the Reformation. The memorial was consciously patterned on the Eleanor Crosses, which those who attended my Art Deco walk last summer will know all about. Colin even showed us the cross on the road nearby that marked the actual spot the three men were burnt to death.
Neaby Balliol College was founded in 1263 and Balliol men (and they were all men back then) were described by former alumnus H.H.Asquith (PM from 1908-1916 and the man who took us into World War I) as possessing the "the tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority". Have a look at this list and see if you agree:- Adam Smith, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene (yay), Howard Marks, Richard Dawkins, Christoper Hitchens, Robert Peston, William Rees-Mogg (boos, mainly for his awful son), Cressida Dick (a woman!), Hilaire Belloc, Matthew Arnold. Gerald Manley Hopkins, Boris Johnson (biggest boo of the day), Yvette Cooper, Denis Healey, Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins, and John Wycliffe. With a few noble exceptions there's a lot, a helluva lot, of entitlement in that list. Far more than there is "effortless superiority".
By now we were in the tourist centre of Oxford. You can buy 'squishies' or listen to the gentle sounds of a lady playing a harp or you could, if you were us, head over to Carfax, long considered the centre of Oxford. Dominated by St Martin's, or Carfax, Tower (all that remains of the 12c St Martin's church). At 74ft tall the word on the street is that no building in central Oxford is allowed to be built higher. You can take the stairs up it to take in the views but my thirsty walkers seemed more interested in going to the pub. More eager to meet the Martins than explore St Martin's!
The spire of the church is considered one of England's most beautiful but the High Street on which it stands has received even more overwhelmingly positive reviews. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described it as "one of the world's great streets", Thomas Hardy, in Jude the Obscure, wrote "ha'nt another like it in the world", and, in 1810, JMW Turner, immortalised it in an oil painting.
St Mary's Passage opens up on to Radcliffe Square and the spectacular Radcliffe Camera. Inspired by the Venetian Andrea Palladio and designed in the English Palladian style by James Gibbs (also known for his two great London churches, St Mary-le-Strand and St Martin-in-the-Fields) it was built between 1737 and 1749 to house the Radcliffe Science Library (funded from the estate of Oxford legend Dr John Radcliffe). It's the first example of a circular library in England and has cropped up in Tolkien, Pullman, and Dorothy Sayers.
It's not the biggest though. Not even the biggest in Oxford. That honour goes to the nearby Bodleian, one of Europe's oldest, which holds 12,000,000 books, second only to the British Library in London. This area, however, truly is one of the UK's, Europe's, or even Earth's, greatest architectural set pieces. Sharing the scene with the Radcliffe and the Bodleian are Nicholas Hawksmoor's 1711-1715 Neoclassical Clarendon Building, and Christopher Wren's (you may've heard of him, he built St Paul's Cathedral) Sheldonian Theatre from 1669. Decorated, as with many local buildings, by gargoyles both grotesque and gormless it seems its establishment dates from Gilbert Sheldon's seventeenth century tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury in which he wished to separate the supposedly then equally worshipped deities God (a popular Christian god) and Apollo (representing Roman and Greek mythology).
A saxophonist was busking nearby to raise money to tour Europe in a motorhome. Considering the plight of many at the moment it was hard to be sympathetic to his cause. More importantly (to me) my phone had gone a bit weird and was adding, annoyingly, weird lines of text to my photographs which I couldn't remove and, more importantly still, the pub was just the other side of the Bridge of Sighs!
The Bridge of Sighs crosses New College Lane and if it's not quite as pretty as the one that spans the Cam in Cambridge (this is more about bicycles than punts) it's still quite special. It joins two parts of Hertford College (alumni:- Jonathan Swift, John Donne, Charles James Fox, Fiona Bruce, Nick Cohen, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Natasha Kaplinsky, Evelyn Waugh) and, pedants have pointed out, it's actually structurally more similar to another famous Venetian bridge, the Rialto, than it is that city's Bridge of Sighs.
Sigh! We turned down the snicket that is St Helen's Passage and met Tony, Alex, Grace, Izzie, Rob, Naomi, Maya, and Zachary in the very crowded, but very beautiful, Turf Tavern. There were eighteen of us. We weren't going to get a table in one of the most atmospheric pubs in one of Britain's most visited towns on a late Saturday afternoon in August. What were we thinking?
So we took some photos and retired to the nearby King's Arms, a pub decorated with nearly as many hefty tomes as the Bodleian! I had a pint, two in fact, of Yellow Hammer and we all caught up with each other's news before I rudely interrupted with my Turf Tavern 'facts'.
Tony was quick to pint out that the Turf Tavern's resident ghost, Rosie, who drowned herself in a nearby moat after her lover failed to return from the civil war may not, strictly speaking, be a fact as such. "FAKE NEWS" I screamed petulantly to no avail but I was on safer ground with assertions that former Aussie PM Bob Hawke, in 1963, set a world record by drinking a yard of ale in eleven seconds there and that Bill Clinton definitely did not inhale when he smoked a joint in the pub garden many moons ago.
The Turf Tavern has also, since it was built in 1381, been visited by Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Thatcher (a boo to rival Boris the bullshitter), and Stephen Hawking (a mighty cheer). The Lamb & Flag in Hardy's Jude the Obscure is inspired by The Turf Tavern which is a bit confusing as Oxford also has a Lamb & Flag. Oxford has lots of nice pubs. We may not have got in the one we wanted but the back up option proved decent.
Naomi, Maya, Zachary, and the Martin family all left us at this point. I felt I'd hardly had time to speak but it'd been great to see them and my heart melted when Zachary ran over to give me a massive hug to say goodbye (I'd been trying to set up a kind of Whack-A-Croc using the four children's heads but it wasn't going well).
Rob joined us for the rest of our walk as we rejoined the High Street via the higgledy-piggledy, and, thanks to a well positioned bollard, free from motorised transport, Queen's Lane. It took us past St Edmund's, or Teddy, Hall. The last surviving medieval hall at Oxford its students have included Robin Day, Keir Starmer, Al Murray, and Stewart Lee. Nobody booed.
Soon we passed Magdalen, so wealthy it has its own deer park, where at sunrise on May mornings the college choir can be heard singing from the Magdalen Tower (1509).
I wouldn't normally share pictures of myself on here (at least not THREE in a row) but I was rather pleased with how these came out. I look both distinguished and happy (which of course I am). I don't expect anybody else to think I look good but I still like myself! Here I'm stood on the Cherwell spanning Magdalen Bridge, students famously injure themselves jumping off it, where punting goes on peacefully below. The bridge, designed by John Gwynn of Shrewsbury, was built between 1772 and 1790 and the Cherwell runs forty miles from near Daventry in Northamptonshire until it reaches the Thames, we'd be following it to that particular confluence.
But first some Magdalen alumni:- Oscar Wilde, John Betjeman, Edward VIII, William Hague (boo), Jeremy Hunt (boo), Dominic Grieve (dilemma for this anti-Brexit Tory), George Osborne (another anti-Brexit Tory but a smug tosser who thoroughly deserved a boo anyway), AC Grayling, Desmond Morris, Ben Goldacre, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julia Hartley-Brewer (a boo from me), Dudley Moore, Louis Theroux, Lawrence of Arabia, and, er, Bertie Wooster!
Just over the bridge where the nearby Plain roundabout splits the High Street into three (St Clement's, Cowley Road, and Iffley Road) sits the athletics track where Roger Bannister ran the world's first sub four minute mile (Rob and I have been running round Oxford for years now and we're still some way off that mark) but we didn't have time to visit. Instead we headed past the oldest botanical gardens in Britain (dating to 1621) into Christ Church Meadow.
This is a beautiful stretch, often you can see people painting the spires from here, that looks across the meadow to the skyline of Oxford and we chose the right time of day to do it. The sun was low covering the whole scene with an almost magical blanket of ultra vivid colours. The greens looked greener than ever, the water more pristine, those punting seemed to be enjoying their wine and Pimms that little bit more in this light. In 1784 the pastry chef James Sadler made the first hot air balloon ascent by an Englishman on this very meadow.
So evocative, so reflective. We reached the confluence of the Cherwell as it drained into Old Father Thames and turned right into Poplar Walk towards Christ Church Cathedral, a building unique in being both cathedral (for Oxon, Berks, and Bucks) and college chapel. Tom Tower, named for its bell Great Tom, was designed by Wren and built in 1681/2 and Tom Quad is Oxford's largest college quad.
Christ Church the college was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII and has cropped up in the works of Shakespeare whilst the dining hall was used for Harry Potter films (if that's your thing). Alumni include Lewis Carroll, John Wesley, Anthony Eden, Edward VII, David Dimbleby, Sir Robert Peel, George Canning, Gladstone, Nigel Lawson, Edward de Bono, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Max Mosley, John Ruskin, Richard Curtis, WH Auden, Riz Ahmed, and Ludovic Kennedy.
A mouthwatering list that had surely earned us another pint. We made haste to The Head of the River, a popular destination for a post-art or post-run Oxford debrief, which has, sadly, due to incompetent and rude staff gone downhill. We stood ignored at the bar for some minutes before being told we needed to go to another bar because they weren't serving there. We did this only to be ignored again as the staff either shuffled chairs around, chatted amongst themselves, or, the final insult, started serving people at the bar we'd just been requested to vacate. We asked why this was and was told "they came in". We came in too but, now, we walked out. We didn't get a drink but they lost at least £60 of business from us that day and, surely, hundreds of pounds in future custom that will now be taken elsewhere. I was so incensed I went on Trip Advisor and only the 'absolute cunt' (sometimes I have to quote myself) who acts as landlord of the Harrow Inn on Ightham Common had angered me enough to do that in the past.
Hunger was taking over from thirst by now so we headed straight to the very lovely 4500 Miles From Delhi in the City Centre. Cobra and Kingfisher beer was dispensed and my chilli paneer and tandoori roti combo was delicious and not as spicy as the three chillis on the menu suggested it might be. Rather satisfyingly, and as if to mark the passing of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, both a coffee and a naan were ordered.
We laughed, we chatted, and we argued about politics, religion, and, mostly, the ethics (or lack of ethics) of social media giants like Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, and, more than all of 'em, Facebook. It got a bit heated at times and I certainly said a couple of things that came more from anger than common sense but the main shame was some friends not involved in the 'debate' looked bored by it. It's never good to bore people so I apologise for that. Truth be told we were engaged in what Vince Cable memorably called "the narcissism of small differences" in which people who hold very very similar views end up arguing the toss about the minutiae of things. It's not something you imagine concerns Donald Trump's people!
The day, the night, seemed to be over too soon. Colin had left before the meal. Next Adam and Teresa shot off followed by Pam, and Rob before Shep, Tina, Neil, Bee, Eamon, and myself headed to The White Rabbit for lasties. Shep and Tina had a very swift one before they head to catch a train but the rest of us wrong 'uns ended up necking another three pints while the friendly bar staff and clients enjoyed the sounds of Bloc Party, Parquet Courts, and the recently departed Aretha Franklin. RESPECT indeed to The White Rabbit staff for showing those at The Head of the River how to work a bar. We'd taken another trip to Wonderland and this time we'd not even had to worry about being blown off a cliff to our certain deaths on the rocks below. It'd been flat, it'd been easy, and it'd been fun.
Thanks to Pam, Neil, Bee, Eamon, Shep, Tina, Teresa, Adam, Rob, Naomi, Maya, Zachary, Tony, Alex, Grace, Izzie, and my co-pilot Colin for making an interesting day a fun one too. Next month we're leaving the Thames for a walk along the Ouse from Newhaven to Lewes but in October we'll be back on it briefly when we head to Gravesend before working our way through the beautiful Kentish countryside to Rochester and the Medway. By then I'll be fifty years old. Hopefully I won't need a stick.
Thanks to Pam, Neil, Bee, Eamon, Shep, Tina, Teresa, Adam, Rob, Naomi, Maya, Zachary, Tony, Alex, Grace, Izzie, and my co-pilot Colin for making an interesting day a fun one too. Next month we're leaving the Thames for a walk along the Ouse from Newhaven to Lewes but in October we'll be back on it briefly when we head to Gravesend before working our way through the beautiful Kentish countryside to Rochester and the Medway. By then I'll be fifty years old. Hopefully I won't need a stick.
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