A spicy mix of Oxford stories from a house once belonging to a city sausage maker.
For Julian is an antiquary, that is a person who studies the past through looking at historical artefacts. And it is his lifetime’s collection of the stuff (and still counting), that I am delighted to have been invited to see today.
At exactly this time last year I wrote on these pages about my outing to Iffley Meadows in search of Oxfordshire’s county flower, the snake’s head fritillary. I’d been informed that this was one of the few places close to the city where one could see in any numbers these delicate plum-coloured bells with their distinctive reptilian markings. And although I had been rewarded by the sight of a smattering of what have affectionately been called by descriptive names like ‘chequered lily’, ‘frog cup’, or ‘chess flower’ it was not the carpet, the swathes, the spectacle I had been expecting. For that, I was told later with a nod and a wink by those in the know, I must go to Addison’s Walk, a one mile raised pathway that circles an ancient island water meadow between tributaries of the River Cherwell in the grounds of Magdalen College.
I am delighted to present for your amusement some engravings by George Glover from William Stokes’s book ‘The vaulting master or the art of vaulting’ in the hope that they…
Not far from where I live stands the Martyrs’ Memorial, a tall spire like edifice crowned with a cross positioned at the northern gateway into the city centre.
I’d arranged to meet Roger Forster and Bob Dowling, the double act who look after the boating side of things down here amongst the willows on the edge of the water, still high and fast flowing from the recent rainfall. They are preparing for the upcoming punt hire season and there is much work to be done. For their fleet of flat-bottomed boats, stored over winter in a large brick outbuilding need sanding down and varnishing, repairing, and repainting. And there are new punts to be finished, their workhorse shells made strong for a summer of bumps and battering. But then they are old hands at this kind of thing. Because they have both been at it a very long time.
For so detailed and realistic are the flowers, fruits and foliage carved around the border that they seem as if they are still sprouting and suffused with life, so rounded and realistic that you might feel inclined to reach out and pluck them for the table.
A bright sunny day this week found me heading up Walton Street to St Sepulchre’s cemetery. Sandwiched between a Londis convenience store – with its mops, brushes and buckets of…
This is Hill End Camp, 67 acres of unspoiled countryside four miles west of Oxford, protected by deed of trust for the outdoor education of children. And it is here that I am heading today, 100 years after the first cohort of infants from West Oxford Elementary School arrived by charabanc back in 1926. A pioneering project that championed a belief in the physical and phsycological benefits of being in the ‘great outdoors’, of immersing yourself in nature. And I am delighted to say that it is still going strong.
When Richard Rawlinson died in April 1755, he left instructions in his will that his heart ‘be taken out, enclosed in a silver cup with spirits and put into a black marble urn’. Then, after the rest of his body was laid to rest in St Giles Church in Oxford, this once beating organ was to be taken across the road to be stored separately at his old university college, St John’s.
It is the 2nd February, or Candlemas, the date in the church calendar that marks the end of Christmastide and the beginning of spring. And to celebrate my friend, walking companion and expert in all things flora and fauna has taken me on a jaunt to see Candlemas Bells, more widely known as snowdrops, but so nicknamed after the time of year their delicate drooping heads emerge from the darkness of their frozen winter beds. A great place to see them in profusion, she claims, is not far from Oxford in the gardens of Nuneham House. About which I am secretly thrilled. For this is the resting place of the Carfax Conduit, a proud monument that once stood in the very centre of the city. I’d been keen to take a closer look for ages.