Out and about in the Oxfordshire countryside

Yesterday after Mass I went off with a friend for a pub lunch in a rural hostelry by the Oxford canal, and we then had a drive around the area I wrote about in April 2010 in The Cherwell valley in spring, with a break for tea, also by the canal, at Lower Heyford.

It is not quite Spring yet - there is not yet that particular warmth in the air that indicates its arrival, but the weather is very mild for the time of year and the snowdrops are in flower, as well as some ealry varieties of cultivated daffodils.

The landscape has its own considerable variety - table land on the road north towards Deddington and Banbury, with very much a sense that this is Mercia and the midlands, but with a landscape more like that of the Cotswolds in the valley of the Cherwell only a short distance to the east.

We drove past Rousham House, built in 1635 by the family which still owns it. There are a set of pictures, taken during the winter, of the house and the very important garden lay out of about 1720 here.

Rousham House

Image: william round on Panoramio

On our way back to Oxford we drove past the good medieval church of St Nicholas at Tackley, the core of which is Anglo-Saxon, and with seventeenth century estate buildings in the village.

Tackley Church

Image: © Copyright Sarah Charlesworth and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

It was a rector of Tackley who built in Oxford a house which, known as Tackley's Inn, was purchased for £20 in 1324 by Adam de Brome when he founded what was to become Oriel College as its first home. The Inn is still owned by the College and part of it still occupied by students.

Very much a landscape that has been lived in, cultivated and nurtured over the centuries. It was one that could be savoured as we drove back to Oxford, with the promise of lengthening days and the spring on the way.

The Cherwell valley in spring

A fine Sunday spring afternoon was enjoyed with a good pub lunch and then a drive around familiar haunts in the Cherwell valley with a friend. Spring does finally seem to have properly arrived in this part of England, and it was good to be able to enjoy it. Woodstock, Tackley and Rousham, Upper and Lower Heyford form a somewhat Betjemanesque litany of the English countryside. Whenever I go into this part of rural Oxfordshire I am reminded of the passage in R.V. Lennard's Rural England 1086-1135 in which he writes of these villages of the Cherwell valley, making the point - obvious yet so easily overlooked - that these settlements were, with odd exceptions, or ones which have disappeared, well established by the time of Domesday Book.

That is not just a point of interest to students of local history - it has wider implications. It is a reminder, and with an election upon us, worth reflecting upon, that we are an ancient realm and that essential continuities are things to be respected and treasured.

It is also a reminder as one passes, for example, the partially Saxon church at Tackley, that the church, and indeed the Church, have been central to the lives of those communities. Rural England is intimately bound up with a seemingly long lost Catholic England. But, look again, that Catholic England is still there, perhaps hidden and beneath the surface, but there, and quickened with the message of Resurrection. After all it was through this area that the young John Henry Newman walked to preach his first sermon at Over Worton, and the preparation of which had led to the first questioning of his Evangelical formation.