A spicy mix of Oxford stories from a house once belonging to a city sausage maker.
I’m used at this time of year to the rusts and copper colours of autumn, but here was something much brighter and more showy. What I can only describe as a dazzle, a delight, a drama, the best collective nouns I can dream up for what are surely the crown jewels of October’s flowers, dahlias.
Monday October 19, is the feast day of St Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford. And so I decide to cycle to Binsey, a tiny hamlet of houses to the north west of the city. Though some might know it as the setting for Gerald Manley Hopkin’s famous lament, ‘Binsey Poplars’, this is also where in the 7th century, according to legend, Frideswide, a Christian noble woman, fled to escape the unwanted advances of the Mercian prince, Algar. Algar follows in hot pursuit with soldiers and dogs to hunt her down. But when he is struck blind by a thunderbolt as if from heaven, the godly Frideswide takes pity on him, and her prayers bring forth a healing spring, whose curative waters restore his sight. 1400 years later and the well still remains where it first bubbled up, now commonly known as ‘the treacle well’, for reasons I hope to explain.
I’d become interested in the story recently when by chance I found myself staring at perhaps the most famous coin minted during that time, the Oxford Crown. It stands in a case of its own, on a lower floor of the Ashmolean and is positioned so that you can walk around it and see the full glory of its exquisite detail. On the obverse side is a proudly mounted King Charles, in one hand the hilt of a drawn sword held aloft, the other the reins of his snorting charger. You can almost make out the breath from the horse’s flared nostrils and feel the breeze as the monarch’s sash billows out behind him.
On one of the last of this year’s long summer days, I accept an invitation from my friend Gina to take a walk along the Ridgeway, also known as the oldest road in Britain. She had discovered that she could use her free pass on the bus to London as far as Lewknor, a small Oxfordshire village at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, and a stone’s throw from the ancient path trodden for over 5,000 years by generations of our ancestors.
One morning during the summer I found myself on my knees in front of a man with his legs in the air. Desperate for some respite from the heat, I had popped into the cool shade of the chapel of Magdalen College, (free entry for Oxford residents), and there he was. An impish look on his face, and a smile on his lips, peering from between his splayed lower limbs, exposing his bare buttocks in a feat of enviable acrobatics.
This past week there’s definitely been an early morning nip in the air. The sun is lower in the sky, the leaves are turning, and the nights are closing in.…
Mary Whitehead is kneeling in front of a part buried gravestone thick with yellow lichen when she calls me over to take a look. We are in the churchyard of the 12th century St Michael and All Angels Church in Fringford, just north of Bicester, and the decorative carving on the stone’s crown as well as its positioning on the main pathway tells her that this might be one of the oldest here. Carefully she takes her trowel and pulls back the inch or so of turf that has grown up around it.
Arriving in England from Southern Italy in 1960 to take up positions in domestic service, they were always going to grow their own – it was what you did back home. And over the years, they have cultivated everything from peas, parsnips, and pumpkins to chicory, chard, carrots and cucumbers, beetroot, borlotti beans and purple sprouting broccoli. They may no longer have the bend in their bodies to put in the hours they once did, but with no garden at home this is still their favourite spot, where they like to come to get out of the house. The place in which they have produced such abundance is where they feel most happy.
I am staring at a vast map on the wall of the cavernous Blackwell Hall in the Weston Library, a stone’s throw from the centre of Oxford. How I could have missed this huge hanging in the hundreds of times I have walked in this space I have no idea. But today as if by some magic here I am, standing in front of it, taking it all in.
Transfixed.
Take one look at the faded photograph of the charming villa above and you might think this a story about Oxford house prices. Far from it. It’s the tale of John Towle, the Victorian mill owner turned architect who created this unconventional dwelling – a house of cards I suppose one might say, for it is constructed almost entirely from paper. Not the ‘huff and puff and blow your house down’ kind of paper production of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. But a residence that stood strong and upright from when it went up in 1844 until it was finally demolished in 1996. That’s an amazing lifespan for any building. Never mind one made of paper.