Oxford Walking

Oxford's "Mr Darcy" with DaithaiC

My regular Blogistas will know that there is a soft spot in my heart for Oxford, the City of the Dreaming Spires, which lies some 18 Leagues from Castle Caldwell. However, as a frequent visitor I somewhat despair of the Tourist Oxford many of them see as they take the Open Top Bus Tour or even worse, visit the theme park style overpriced “Oxford Experience”, which as its name might suggest is nothing of the sort. 

Ye Town Crier of Oxford

So I was glad to make the acquaintance of Oxford’s answer to Mr. Darcy, the multi-faceted Alasdair de Voil, who dresses up as Jane Austen's Mr Darcy to do the excellent walking tours and who has even started marketing 'Teas and Tours with Mr Darcy!'. Oxford is best explored on foot with its myriad lanes, courtyards, meadows, colleges and nooks and crannies. There are several excellent walking tours but Alasdair’s appeals both for the inimitable sense of personality he adds to the tours and because a donation from them goes to Oxfam. This charity was originally started in this City as the Oxford Famine Relief Fund and is still based in the city.

I Love Oxford Walking Tours was established in Oxford in spring 2011 and offers guided historical walking tours departing outside the Oxfam shop, 17 Broad Street (located next to Oxford Tourist Information Office), OX1 3AS.

Tours cost £8 and depart at 11.00am, 1pm and 2.30pm. Depending on numbers and the season, they may also offer tours at 12, 2 and possibly 4pm. Finally, there is a very eccentric pub tour Alasdair offers on Saturday nights from 8pm. Other nights can be arranged if requested. It also costs £8 but includes 1 free drink.

Hertford Bridge, popularly known as the Bridge of Sighs

N.B. The Pub Tour requires minimum 4 people to book in advance and it departs from outside Saxon Tower and KFC on Cornmarket. The pub tour welcomes local people out for a night out in Oxford too, in conjunction with

www.OxfordNightsOut.com

Usefully for the bargain conscious visitor you can use your tour ticket or flyer to save money in over 40 local businesses- wherever you see 'I Love Oxford' postcards or posters in shop, cafe or tourist attraction windows!

I Love Oxford Walking Tours AND  I Love Oxford Benefits CARD.

See website at http://www.ILoveOxford.com

Find them also on Facebook at I Love Oxford Walking Tours plus I Love Oxford and at I Love Oxford Benefits Card

Daily Guided History Tours of Oxford outside Oxfam shop, Broad Street

PLUS Oxford Pub Tour, Saturdays 8pm

The Radcliffe Camera seen from Braesnose College

What visitors find here is not a single University campus but a jumble of colleges, libraries, museums, fine shops and other buildings. Added to this, Oxford City Council actively tries to preserve the character of the historic centre by discouraging cars and through traffic and encouraging walking, cycling and public transport. Car restrictions are rigorously enforced.  Therefore Alasdair’s Tour, as well as helping charity, provides a far better way of seeing and experiencing the heart of this unique, historic and hugely influential University City.

The College of All Souls

Not to be outdone by Mr. Darcy (!) DaithaiC has also developed his ROT (Reduced Oxford Tour) is in the traditions of our

RLT Reduced London Tour http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/09/day-in-london.html

and its aim is to show you the real Oxford as cheaply as possible and keep you out of overpriced and tacky tourist attractions. Perhaps you might wander to some of these locations after getting your bearings on Alasdair’s excellent perambulation!

http://daithaic.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/day-in-oxford.html

See also; Oxford Rambles;

http://daithaic.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/oxford-rambles.html

For Blogs and much more on Oxford see OXONIENSIS in my Blog Sidebar to the right; 

Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring,

The tender purple spray on copse and briers!

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,

She needs not June for beauty's heightening

- Matthew Arnold

Ellan Vannin

It was a sad day today in our neighboring town of Thame at Robin Gibbs funeral. He had lived for 30 years in the Old Rectory across from St. Mary’s Church and was well known and liked in the town. His casket was draped in the flag of Ellan Vannin, the name in Manx Gaelic of The Isle of Man, where he and his brothers were born. The Bee Gees adapted a poem of the same name as a song which ends with the words which seem so appropriate today;

“And in all my times of sorrow

And on some lonely shore

I'll go back to Ellan Vannin

To my childhood days once more”

The Isle of Man in the middle of the Irish Sea is a truly unique and beautiful place inhabited since 6,500 BC and never incorporated into either the Roman Empire (Julius Caesar referred to it as Mona in 54 BC) nor is it part of The United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the European Union (EU). ). Its parliament, the Tynwald is of Celtic / Norse origin and over 1,000 years old, and is the oldest parliament in the world with an unbroken existence.

It had a unique Gaelic-Norse culture and the motto on its three legged (Trie Cassyn) flag is; “Quocunque jeceris stabit” – loosely translated as “wherever I’m thrown, I will stand” – probably a fair summation of Robin Gibbs life and achievements.

Buscot Park, Oxfordshire

Buscot Park South Garden Front


North Entrance Front

The National Trust is nothing if not a broad church encompassing everything from back-to-backs in Birmingham to splendid blingtastic mansions such as the wondrously restored and goodie filled Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor near Aylesbury.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/waddesdon-manor-buckinghamshire.html

What I particularly enjoy is the plurality of properties and approaches. Some are fully restored but others are “conserved” or kept at a particular time in their history. So the National Trust (to its great credit) does not adopt a “one size fits all” approach to the properties and nature reserves in its care. This plurality is reflected in Buscot Park which is actually managed with some aplomb by the 3rd Lord Faringdon of the Henderson Banking family who are also involved with Cazenoves, one of the last of the old time City Stockbrokers.


Entrance

A stipulation in the agreement with the National Trust stated that Buscot would be leased to the Barons Faringdon, enabling them to remain in residence. This arrangement has continued to the present day. The present and 3rd Lord Faringdon, with his wife, not only lives in the house, but is responsible for the day to day management and decoration of the mansion. Although Lord and Lady Faringdon have built a smaller house, the Garden House, in the grounds for their personal use during the summer months when the tourist season is at its peak, the interior of the house has very much the uncontrived air of a private residence rather than that of a public art gallery




Chairs commemorating the Battle of the Nile

However it does house a major portion of the Faringdon Collection which includes some outstanding Pre-Raphaelite pieces. The present Lord Faringdon has added many works of art to the collection, including contemporary paintings, ceramics, glass and silver. The house, gardens and grounds are open each year from April to September.
Buscot Park is an outstanding eighteenth century house (1780) in the Palladian style with a twentieth century garden. The garden is a prime example of the Italian mode of the Arts and Crafts style, designed by Harold Peto in 1912. It has a canal which steps down the slope through the woods, edged by hedges, urns and statues. The kitchen garden is now planted with flowers, to a design by Peter Coats, with hornbeam tunnels.


The water gardens, designed by Harold Peto, link the more formal gardens, close to the house, through the park to the distant lake.

We had an immediate introduction to the personal quality of Buscot when we went to the tea room on arrival. Like many before we were entranced the vigorous and colourful murals that decorate the Buscot tea room, which was converted from part of the eighteenth-century stable block in 1991. The murals, painted a secco (on dry plaster), between 1991 and 1994, are the work of Ellen-Ann Hopkins, and they evoke the Renaissance style of Veronese, who covered the walls of the Villa Barbaro with amusing portraits of the owner and his family. Here, the artist has included many symbolic objects whose full meaning is understood only by the family and friends of Lord Faringdon, though everyone will recognise the family lurchers, the black swans from the Buscot Park lakes, and various flowers from the Four Seasons garden. Rather than include her own self-portrait, the artist has allowed her faithful black Scottie, Macbeth, to stand in for her. Quixotic and enigmatic, the frescoes are also full of energy and colour and form a part of the continuing artistic tradition at Buscot Park.






Teahouse Murals

Buscot Park was built between 1780 and 1783 for Edward Loveden Townsend inspired by the architecture of the great Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio. In 1859 his great-grandson sold the estate to an Australian tycoon, Robert Tertius Campbell. He died in 1887 after spending a fortune turning Buscot into a model agricultural estate. The estate (of 4,000 acres) was in some disrepair by the time 'Squire Campbell' bought it, but he employed one hundred men to help build a reservoir, delivering a state of the art irrigation system to the pastures, which would turn it into a hugely efficient farm. He had the - at the time, outrageous - idea to grow sugar beet, which would in turn be distilled to make spirit alcohol. He had a working distillery built at the estate (on a small island next to the lock - still called 'Brandy Island'). The distillery closed in 1879, after the French men he employed to run it were called back to France to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Englishmen who took over didn't really know what they were doing. Mr Campbell also built a mill, a turbine, a gas works, and had a little railway; he was known for his fondness for state of the art machinery.


Saloon


Entrance Hall

He died (bankrupt) in 1885, and two years after his death the estate was sold to Sir Alexander Henderson, a highly successful city financier, later 1st Lord Faringdon whose descendants continue to live here. With catholic tastes in art, he bought paintings by Rembrandt, Murillo, Reynolds and Burne-Jones, establishing a solid core to the Faringdon Collection. He was Chairman of the Great Central Railway from 1889 to 1922, and died 12 years after retiring from that position. He passed on Buscot Park (and his title) to his heir, his grandson Gavin Henderson (born in 1902).


Orangery


Buscot Park, one of the two flanking wings designed by Geddes Hyslop in 1934 to replace Victorian additions, considered incongruous.

Gavin Henderson, the 1st Lord Faringdon’s grandson and heir, was also an enthusiastic collector of pictures, and he added the bulk of the pictures to be seen at Buscot today. He also remodelled the house by removing the heavy Victorian additions that had compromised the original design, as well as building the two balancing pavilions that stand to the east and west of the house. He was educated at Eton, then Oxford, and one of the 'Bright Young Things' depicted in novels by Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh.





Unusually, for someone in his position, he became a member of the Labour Party (and later the Fabian Society). He was a staunch pacifist, so during the Second World War, gave his energies to the Fire Service. After the war he became a Labour County Councillor in London, and after that served on the Historic Buildings committee of the Greater London Council once it was formed. He died in 1977.


Swimming Pool




Theatre and murals

Other notable frescos at Buscot are on the swimming pool pavilion at the side of the house. Painted by John Hastings (who later became the Earl of Huntingdon) at some time in the late 1930s, they portray friends of the 2nd Lord Faringdon, and some of the Buscot Park staff. Lord Faringdon himself is portrayed as a young man addressing a Labour Party rally in the scene on the left (as you face the pool), while above is a portrait of Mr Cowdray, Buscot’s Farm Manager, leading a prize bull, and Mr Bastion, the Head Gardener, with some exotic blooms. John Hastings’ self-portrait is in the adjacent roundel, and the lady portrayed in the roundel opposite is Susan Lawrence, one of the first women Labour MPs and chairman of the Labour party from 1929 to 1930. Two other well-known figures portrayed here are Lord Berners, who lived at Faringdon House nearby, and Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, both of whom are among the guests of Lord Faringdon seated at dinner. Altogether apart from their artistic merit these murals are a remarkable piece of political and social history.



At Buscot Park you will also find exquisite gardens, including the spectacular Water Garden designed by Harold Peto and the Four Seasons Walled Garden created by the present Lord Faringdon. The House is home to the Faringdon Collection which contains an extraordinary array of paintings, furniture and objets d'art. There is also a small purpose built theatre which is regularly used for concerts, plays and corporate hospitality.



The Faringdon Collection, which can be viewed at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire and the Faringdon’s London property in Beauchamp Place SW7, is the result of a century of collecting works of art by the Lords Faringdon. It includes paintings by Rembrandt, Reynolds, Rubens, van Dyck and Murillo, and there is a small but important collection of drawings. British art, especially of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is particularly well represented in the Collection, with some outstanding works by the Pre-Raphaelite artists Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and the present Lord Faringdon continues to acquire new works by contemporary artists.


View across lake

The Legend of Briar Rose is the title of a series of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones which were completed between 1885 and 1890. The four original paintings - The Briar Wood, The Council Chamber, The Garden Court and The Rose Bower - and an additional ten adjoining panels, are located at Buscot Park.

The Legend of Briar Rose

The Rose


The Garden Court


The Council Chamber


Briar Wood

For more on Edward Burne-Jones see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/09/wightwick-manor-wolverhampton.html

To the west of the house, the mellow red-brick walls of the original kitchen garden now shelter the Four Seasons garden, bright with the blooms of spring bulbs, flowering trees and drifts of multi-coloured day lilies, according to the time of year. To the east, woodland walks lead to one of Britain’s finest water gardens, an unusual marriage of Italianate formality with an English parkland landscape.


Chinese Warriors in the garden

From the south front of the house, the carriage drive sweeps away to the south east, down through mature woodland. From the north front of the house, the views take in the Little Lake and the Thames plain beyond. From neither point is any clue given of the splendid water garden that lies to the east of the house, reached by following the steps from the north terrace.





This is a lovely place to visit. Having walked up to the main house and found yourself looking across the back lawns a stunning Anglo- Italianate box edged walk leads you down to a sublime view of an enormous lake, the view tightly constrained by the narrowness of the avenue and height of trees. Rooms occur within the Avenue/walk with colonnades of Juniper and sleepy water features and waterway tempting you down to the lake.

Read more: http://www.gardenvisit.com/garden/buscot_park#ixzz1Rpd8DMRp

In 1956 the Buscot Park estate was bequeathed to the National Trust, and the contents of the house were subsequently transferred to the Trustees of the Faringdon Collection. The present Lord Faringdon lives at Buscot Park, administering the house and grounds on behalf of the National Trust. He continues to acquire new works by contemporary artists to enhance the Faringdon Collection. With the combination of a wonderful Palladian Mansion, beautiful setting and gardens and the high calibre Faringdon Collection this would be a very rewarding place to visit. However the personal touches, the sense that this is a home still lived in and the obvious love and attention shown by the family lift Buscot Park to another level and make visiting here particularly rewarding.





Postal Address;

The Estate Office, Buscot Park
Faringdon, Oxon SN7 8BU

Information Line: Tel: 01367 240932

Telephone (Mon - Fri ): Tel: 01367 240786

Website; http://www.buscot-park.com

Greys Court

Greys Court

On a beautiful English summer’s day we travel this Sunday across rolling wooded Chiltern countryside through Chinnor and Watlington down towards where the hills hit the scenic part of the Thames River Valley. The object of our interest? The exquisite Tudor home of Greys Court with its equally beautiful setting and archetypical English garden set out as a series of garden rooms in the remains of an even more ancient medieval court of the de Grey family including a 13th century tower which you can ascend. It even has a James Bond connection having been owned for a while by Lady Evelyn Fleming, mother of Bond author Ian Fleming and his travel writer brother Peter.


The vista of the Chiltern Hills from the house





It is an intimate family home and peaceful estate set in the rolling hills of the Chilterns. This picturesque 16th-century mansion and tranquil gardens were home to the Brunner family until recent years. Reopening in 2010 after two years of closure for conservation work, the house exudes a welcoming atmosphere with a well-stocked kitchen and homely living rooms. The series of walled gardens is a colourful patchwork of interest set amid medieval ruins. Other buildings from earlier eras include the Great Tower from the 12th century and a rare Tudor donkey wheel, in use until the early 20th century.


Kitchen garden viewed from the Tower


Great Tower from the 12th century


The owl in the tower



Greys Court is a Tudor country house and associated gardens at the southern end of the Chiltern Hills at Rotherfield Greys, near Henley-on-Thames in the English county of Oxfordshire. It is owned by the National Trust and is open to the public. The name derives from an old connection to the Grey family, descendants of the Norman knight Anchetil de Greye. The estate or manor of Rotherfield Greys upon which Greys Court is situated is specifically mentioned in the Domesday Book.


Bluebells in the woods at Greys Court




Fresh organic produce from the kitchen garden

The mainly Tudor style house has a beautiful courtyard and gardens. The walled gardens are full of old-fashioned roses and wisteria, an ornamental vegetable garden, maze (laid to grass with brick paths, dedicated by Archbishop Robert Runcie on 12 October 1981) and ice house. Within the gardens is a medieval fortified tower of 1347, the only remains of the previous castle, giving extensive views of the gardens and surrounding countryside. Also to be found within the gardens is a Tudor wheelhouse, where a donkey operated a treadmill to haul water from a well.


The Dower House


The knot garden and Dower House


The Red Kite has been succesfully re-introduced to the Chilterns and this magnificent bird of prey can be viewed from the Tower

The delightful gardens have been created amongst the ruins with rambling old fashioned roses and wisteria. In the garden by the Great Tower is a pond filled with all sorts of wildlife including some Crested Newts swimming with the tadpoles, a rare species in the UK today. The ground floor of the house is open to the public and contains some outstanding 18th Century plasterwork. The out-buildings include a Tudor donkey wheel house and a 19th Century ice house.





The house itself has an interesting history, and the interior, with some outstanding 18th-century plasterwork, is still furnished as a family home. Greys Court was for a time owned by Sir Francis Knollys, treasurer to Elizabeth I, and jailer of Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1937 the house was bought by Sir Felix Brunner (1897- 1982) and his wife Lady Elizabeth Brunner, the grand-daughter of the Victorian era actor-manager Henry Irving. In 1969 they donated the property to the National Trust, with the family continuing to live in the house until the death of Lady Brunner in 2003.


Statue carved in ash-wood of Charles Taylor gardener at Greys Court from 1937 - 1955

'Framed like a picture by the rarest and stateliest of trees and erected amongst the remains of a vast old castellated mansion....'




This is how Mary Russell Mitford describes Greys Court in her book 'Recollections of a Literary Life'(1851). It is also surprising how little has changed at Greys since this was written nearly 150 years ago.The countryside has been tamed somewhat, but progress still remains locked out as you enter the grounds of the Estate. Immediately you are swept back through centuries of building, from times of great wealth and pleasure, to more sinister times when castellated towers and walls were built to make the life of those who lived within more secure.




Fountain in the kitchen garden with a poem by the Roman Poet Horace hoping for a good harvest



For such an old dwelling that has been constantly occupied, very little evidence has survived to tell us of its early history. In the Domesday Book, Anchetil de Greye is described as owning Redrefield (Rotherfield). The de Greys also had lands in Norfolk and this line of the Family gave us John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich and justicular of Ireland who died in 1214. He served in King John's retinue from 1198. John had him elected Archbishop of Canterbury after Hubert Walter's death in 1205, but this was quashed by Innocent III and Stephen Langton was elected. By the end of the 13th century the de Grey family were spread all over England with the Baron Grey's of Wilton and the Baron Grey's of Codnor being the senior members. They all went on to serve their King in Wales, Scotland and later in the Hundred Years War with France.

The de Grey family continued to own the estate of Rotherfield for more than four centuries. In 1239 Walter de Grey, Archbishop of York, brought Rotherfield from his Kinswoman, Eve de Grey, in order to give it to his brother Robert de Grey, ancestor of the Lords Grey of Rotherfield. This Robert's Grandson, Sir Robert de Grey fought for Edward I in Wales in 1282/3.




Kitchen Garden

The abiding impression you are left with is the one which convinced the Brunner’s to buy this property in 1937 – the incomparably peaceful, secluded and very beautiful setting in the Chiltern Hills with just the most wonderful vistas on all sides. The love and care they have shown to the house and gardens since is wonderful making for a very satisfying visit. There is so much athmosphere between the Tudor house with its adjoining outbuildings, the wonderful collection of gardens – a cherry garden, knot garden, rose garden, wisteria garden and abundant kitchen gardens and orchard – and its collections of buildings – The Dower House, The Medieval Tower, the cottages and the Donkey wheel it leaves an impression which is quintessentially English.





The Donkey wheel which supplied water to the house from a 200 ft deep well until 1914

Above all the National Trust have shown their sure hand and experience in historic buildings and surroundings. They have not attempted to over restore but to conserve. So the house and kitchen are much as Lady Brunner would have left it when she died at the age of 99 in 2003 and it has the athmosphere of a family house with their story very cleverly told in inscriptions on crockery plates and embroidered cushions. They have also resisted the temptation to manicure the gardens with the kitchen garden run as a working garden with the plants and produce for sale. We are very lucky to have so many special places like this conserved by the National Trust and generous benefactors whose legacy lives on such as the Brunner’s.


Plaque commemorating Greys Court being gifted to the National Trust in 1969 by Sir Felix and Lady Brunner


Greys Court.

Rotherfield Greys, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire RG9 4PG

Telephone: 01494 755564 (Infoline).



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