It’s weird restarting the HoLEwalk almost a year since completing the first section and even stranger not starting from our house. We arrived in Oxford by train yesterday and I was full of apprehension. Today, the weather’s bright and breezy, lifting my mood to match it.
We stock up on provisions at the Tesco Express on St Aldate’s, spotting a red kite above the ‘dreaming spires’ echoing its Egyptian black kite cousins. We’ve had a good stay: a brilliant dinner at La Cucina on St Clement’s and a veggie breakfast cooked to order at the Premier Inn in Westgate.
We head down via the castle to the Oxford Canal Heritage Trail. I lived here for years but never went down any of the canal paths. We walk along, passing residential barges, coming up to Isis lock. As we approach, there’s a flash of white and a bird dives into the water. It emerges with an iridescent silver fish in its red beak. A common tern fishing a couple of feet away from us in the middle of a city! It’s a breath-taking and completely unexpected sight. We cross the bridge and go up onto the road to reach the Thames path.
It’s closed. Beyond the warning sign, there are solid cast iron barriers with a loud rasping machinery noise emanating from within. We retrace our steps and go back along the canal. We pass the boatyard in Jericho where Rich and his friends Patch and Steve hired a two berth narrow boat for a canal holiday, despite the fact all three of them are over 6 feet tall.
We continue up via Fiddler Island to reach the Thames Path at Port Meadow. Port Meadow is a large flood plain protecting the city when the river is in spate. It’s changed little since it was used as a burial ground in prehistoric times and is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, consisting of common land grazed by cattle and the Port Meadow ponies.
We both know Port Meadow well, but only from on the river. We used to row eights up here from the Isis to train for selection for the University boat club. This took place in Michaelmas term (October-December) and I’ve always thought of Port Meadow as a desolate place with wind whipping across the water, difficult to identify where is river and where is flood water, sometimes with interesting consequences. Today, it is beautifully bucolic with families, runners and fishermen delighting in their surroundings.
We pass The Perch pub to find a herd of cows sprawling across the path. We pick our way around them and they don’t move a muscle. Usually, if cows are approached, they scatter. Not on Port Meadow. We continue on towards the ruins of Godstow Abbey, another place I never visited despite it being just across the river from the boathouse by TheTrout pub. It was founded by Ediva of Winchester and is most celebrated as the final resting place of Rosamund de Clifford, an erstwhile mistress of Henry II, who retired to Godstow when their affair ended but was never a nun. Her story has been celebrated in folklore, paintings, literature, cinema and opera, the reasons for which are not entirely clear. We pass under the A34 section of the ring road and escape Oxford’s gravitational pull.
There is immediately a fork in the footpaths and we leave the Thames Path to take the CPRE Oxford Green Belt Way, a 50 mile circular walk outside the ring road, opened in 2007. For most medics, CPRE is an acronym for Carbapenem Resistant Enterobacter, so I find this a bit discombobulating . On the footpath signs, of course, it stands for the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
As we pass through meadows, Rich tells me that he once attended a ploughing competition nearby, as one of his university housemates studied Agriculture. Sure enough the University (John Krebbs) Farm is a few metres away. There are no ploughed fields, crops or livestock, however, a theme that oddly continues for most of the day, despite this being prime farmland.
We go up a gentle hill towards Wytham Woods, where I first saw a badger. We can’t go into the trees, though, because they are gated off with barbed and razor wire. They are only open from 10:00 Monday to Friday and require a permit. This means that this unique area of extensive woodland is rarely accessible to working people, fomenting resentment between town and gown.
We follow the exclusion fence around the forest, soon arriving at Eynsham lock, where we stop for a break and an Eccles cake. Eynsham lock was one of the last pound locks built on the Thames, being built by the Thames Conservancy in 1928 as part of plans to make the river navigable to Lechlade. We chat to various people, including the lock keeper, who can’t really understand that we’re not following any particular path.
We pass over a weir and take up the Wharf Stream Way. The Wharf Stream was created to bypass the weir and allow fish to pass up the river to spawn. Judging by the fishing enjoyed by birds and humans on the river today, this plan seems to have been pretty successful. We skirt south of Eynsham village mostly on paths and head west towards South Leigh. The land is starting to undulate now as we reach the Cotswold foothills.
We decide to head to the church of St James the Great at Church End, as churches often have good benches for a lunch stop. There are, in fact, three benches and we occupy two set in lush grass just in the shade from the now sunny day. The door to the church porch is open and swallows swoop in and out of a nest there while we eat our lunch.
After our break, we pick up a footpath towards Margery Cross, then follow a road to High Cogges. We cut off a corner with another path then cross a road to attain another path towards the A40. We are greeted by head high stinging nettles and foliage so dense that it’s impassable. I voice regret that we don’t have a machete; Rich replies that we’d actually need a chainsaw. We go back to walk along the road instead and take an underpass beneath the dual carriageway. We can’t even determine where we would have been disgorged by the abandoned footpath as the undergrowth is so dense.
We head towards Witney but the paths on the ground, signposted by the council, bear minimal relation to those marked on the map. We walk into the town via parkland where a flock of red kites are wheeling acrobatically above us. We cross the main road and head out towards Minster Lovell, our destination for the night, passing Witney Mill where Early’s blanket manufacturing traded until 2002, ending four centuries of blanket making in the town.
We make our way back to the river Windrush where alternating mud slicks and cracked, hard ground challenge our tired limbs. We eat apples which Rich describes as tasting like slightly sour, wet cardboard. At least they are wet.
We finally arrive at the remains of Minster Lovell Hall built in the aristocratic style by the 7th Baron William Lovell in the 15th century. It was bought by the Coke family in 1602 who lived there until the mid eighteenth century, when they built a new mansion called Holkham Hall, in Norfolk. They still live there.
We pass by Minster Lovell Hall and through a churchyard then across a quintessentially English village cricket green to reach the Old Swan for food, a shower and a bed for the night.
Total distance: 204 miles
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