Medieval villages to stately home

Friday, I didn’t even want to touch the car.  I had picked up a map of the area right around the farm and decided to piece together a walk out to various sights around here.

 

Tiny bit of background – during the middle ages, this was all church land, which basically meant that members of the clergy filled the skimming off the top and seeing to it everyone was productive role that would otherwise have been carried out by the secular nobility.  The churches are all quite nice, but the vicarages are often nicer and usually bigger. 

 

I started out walking across the fields to a village called Longcot, mostly to meet up with another path that would take me to Little Coxwell then onward to Great Coxwell.  I will say little about the beauty of these villages or the fields between them, lest I become tiresome, but you can take said beauty on faith. 

 

On the way into Little Coxwell, I had a nice talk with a fellow driving a heavy duty powered chair.  Among other things, he told me I wasn’t to take all the beautiful flowering trees for granted as this was an unusually good year for them owing to a rainy March.  He had to drive on to catch up with his dogs.

 

Great Coxwell is where the importance of the church lands story comes in because it is home to an enormous tithe barn where the church’s cut was collected.  You have to call it a barn, since that’s what it was used for, but architecturally, it’s more a sort of basilica.  If the doors were a little bigger, you could use it for a light aircraft hanger.  The structure is all ancient wood, so the place is full of fire extinguishers.  There are clear instructions that if members of the public detect a fire, they are just to evacuate and call for help, but all those extinguishers tell me they sort of hope those instructions would be disobeyed.

 

From Great Coxwell, I walked to Badbury Hill, another hill fort where I was back to my normal experience of being unable to see any evidence of banks or ditches or anything.  It is mostly wooded now, and it is a very pretty patch of trees.  The understory is solid bluebells right now.  There are numbers of signs begging people not to harvest the bluebells which seemed to be working as I didn’t see any suspicious bare patches.

 

I walked across a few farms and along a track that was the east boundary of Buscot Park.  This is the large estate of the lords Farringdon who take their name from the town where I’d had dinner the night before.  My map made it look as though there was a back entrance to the estate off this road, but no luck.  I walked in about a quarter of a mile before coming to a no entrance sign.  I had to walk back out then up to a big road along which I walked the whole northern border – a mile and a half or so – to the northwest corner for the entrance.

 

Just as I got to the entrance, it started to sleet.  I quick-drew my rain gear including shoving my map into my nerd carrier and putting the rain cover over my pack.  By the time I reached the parking area, the rain and sleet had stopped.  It was still half an hour till doors opened, so I sat on exactly the bench I’d dreamed I might find and read my book.  I’ve given myself a holiday from heavy reading and am zipping through a Wodehouse novel called Ring for Jeeves.  I picked it up in Middleton.  I think I already own it, but under a different title.  I certainly hadn’t read it in a long time, and I’m having fun with it.

 

The clock struck 2 over the ticket office.  I went in and showed my membership card for a free ticket and brochure.  Buscot Park is a beautiful house in the middle of incredible landscaping.  The lords Farringdon have been collecting and displaying art for at least 3 generations.  Say what you will about an aristocracy, but it’s got fringe benefits.  The house and art collection now belong to public trusts, owing to exactly the “socialist” reforms Wodehouse happens to be poking fun at in the novel I’m reading. 

 

I don’t have all the details, but apparently, the UK introduced enormous death taxes on the fabulously wealthy which made it much more appealing for them to gift big chunks of their estates to public trusts in exchange for tax breaks and the right to continue to enjoy use of the property for some number of years or even generations.  For example, the lords Farringdon can still live in parts of the house and they have the hereditary job of curating the art collection.  I can’t even decide how I feel about this from a moral perspective, but I’ve gotten plenty of benefits out of it. 

 

From looking at the house and collection, the Farringdon’s combine relentless precision – the recent work on the house is every bit as good as the 200 year old stuff, which I know is hard work – with a tremendous sense of fun.  Easiest example of that is that the entryway has a statue in it.  There’s fool-the eye-painting on the wall behind it that gives it a permanent shadow.  In a country where sunshine is anything but reliable, this struck me as very witty.  There were other examples, but I liked that one.

 

After the house, I scouted around the grounds for a while.  Another example of the sense of fun was the swing garden, a pretty little space completely surrounded by big swinging benches. 

 

I had a nice tea in the shop, the walls of which were covered with murals that combined whimsical reproductions of pieces from the art collection with portraits of members of the family and celebrities they had entertained at the house.  I then groveled with the ticket lady to try to get me permission to walk out through the back road.   She at least pretended to try, but came back with a no.  I walked back out along the ugly, busy road.

 

I got one benefit.  As I walked back, there were two guys practicing archery.  What could be more English?  There was an older fellow with a classic wooden longbow and a young man with a high tech bow.  The high tech outfit was made of a combination of polymers, ceramics and metals.  It had a complex counterweight system and what looked like a sight.  It clearly drew much heavier than the wooden bow, because the older fellow had to arc his shots significantly to make the distance to the target while the younger man could shoot a much flatter trajectory.  I sort of expected aged skill to triumph over high tech, but not that day.  The older guy did get at least 3 of 6 arrows into a target so far off it took them more than 90 seconds to walk out to it, but the high tech bow put all 6 and from the remarks of a woman with binoculars who was scoring for them, most close to the center.

 

The rest was just easy walking back to the farm.

 

Dinner at the pub.  I asked the bar girl whether the Hawaiian chicken was a good idea.  She told me “yes”, which is a lot of why I self catered dinner again tonight rather than going back.  The barmaids at the Radnor Arms pour good pints, but they are not to be trusted on culinary matters.  They did have three very tasty ales in the cask, which I enjoyed, hence no writing last night.

 

Garmin Facts:  15.1 miles in 5:06 walking for 3 mph walking average.  240 meters climbed plus another 1 mile at least around the grounds at Buscot Park and another 1.5 miles too and from the Radnor Arms for a day total of 17.6.