Tolkien and WWI came to Oxford today

Today Oxford was transformed into Oxford of 1914, at the beginning of World War 1, with young soldiers, horses, and gowned students walking about town.  It felt a bit like a time-warp. 

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Brasenose Lane and the Radcliffe Square was the site of today's film shoot for the movie "Tolkien",  a biopic film of the author JRR Tolkien.  

The movie is about the the early years of the author as he attended college, made friends with a group of outcasts at school, and found love and artistic inspiration.  

Actors waiting on their marks to rehearse a scene on Brasenose Lane, across from Exeter College where Tolkien attended in 1911 to 1915.  

Nicholas Hoult stars as Tolkien and Lily Collins is cast as his love, Edith Bratt

Tolkien enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915.  He married the love of his life, Edith Bratt,  in Warwick on 22 March 1916 before shipping out.  Tolkien met Edith as a freshman at his boarding house in 1911, he was 16 and she was 19.    

After enlisting, Tolkien was sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and was sent back to England, where he spent the next months in hospital in Birmingham. Many of these experiences became inspiration for his Lord of the Rings novels.  

The movie is directed by Finnish director Dome Karukoski and the script is by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford.

I was told the movie will be released in 2018.  I can't wait to see it.

For more information about the film:  http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/tolkien/259843/jrr-tolkien-biopic-cast-story-and-everything-to-know

For more information about JRR Tolkien:  https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/biography/?gclid=CjwKCAiA6K_QBRA8EiwASvtjZaZvdIaMApn6CbGVh7MGjX5GH1dwsfI4goLM1_5ygwxKF4Ar3vjsChoC93IQAvD_BwE

Cotswold Way: Stanton to Snowshill to Buckland Woods and back

Our last summer walk was a perfect circular walk off the Cotswold Way. We started in Stanton and walked to Snowshill, then on to Buckland, and back. We couldn't have picked a lovelier day or a more picturesque part of the Cotswolds.

Our first stop was to the town of Stanway which is spread out along the road towards Stanton, with no really discernable village centre beyond the church. The church and manor of Stanway are right next to each other so that it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

The 12th century parish church of St Peter (with Victorian updates)

The manor is home to Stanway Water Gardens, a baroque garden featuring a 300 ft high fountain and a grand canal beside the lovely manor house. The house and garden were closed since the summer season had ended. It's on my list to visit next summer.

The Cotswold Way National Trail is a walking trail that runs along the length of the Cotswolds, starting in Chipping Campden in the north, and finishing at the front of Bath Abbey in the south.

The trail is 102 miles long and winds through many picturesque villages, such as Snowshill, Cranham & Painswick. The Cotswold Way also passes close to a significant number of historic sites, for example the Roman heritage at Bath, the Neolithic burial chamber at Belas Knap, Sudeley Castle near Winchcombe, Hailes Abbey and many beautiful churches and historic houses.

I would love to walk the entire Cotswold Way, but for now, we keep returning to do circular walks that are part of the trail so we can start and end in the same place. There are several amazing loop trails that take in part of the Cotswold way and we are slowly chipping away at those.

We started our walk at the Cotswold Way signpost towards the top of the village, just down from the Mount Inn. We did things a bit backwards in that we had an early lunch at the Mound Inn (great food) and then walked from there. I'm so glad we did because the Inn was closed by the time we returned late in the afternoon.

Stanton is one of the prettiest villages in the whole of the Cotswolds. It's a village frozen in time with little changed in 300 years.  It has a very pleasing long main street with several delightful corners where the ancient houses are built in typical Cotswolds style with the honey colored limestone walls. It looks like it should be a film set for a BBC period drama.

The walk from Stanton toward Snowshill leads though several fields and meadows, some woods, then up over a hill with beautiful views.  

Before long you can see Snowshill in the distance -- another idyllic Cotswold village.

Snowshill is best known for Snowshill Manor and the lovely Lavender farm just a mile or two from town.  Both are well worth a visit.  Click here to see more about both from a previous blog. 

Following our directions: "Pass through this delightful village between the pub and the church, past the car park and at the entrance to Snowshill Manor you will see a kissing gate leading into a field..."

More directions: "After two more kissing gates and delightful views down the valley the path turns rather more steeply downhill, crossing a stream. Bear left to wind up through the woods, ignoring a gate to the left. This stretch can be muddy after rain. Soon after emerging from the wood pass through a gate and then climb the steepening path up a short hill with fine views. Eventually the path levels out and you exit the field by an old iron kissing gate. Turn right and follow the track for half a mile until you pass through a field gate."

"Turn right along the track down towards a field gate, and continue downhill along the steepsided path. Be careful to watch your footing along this track, but also not to miss the awe-inspiring views (over Stanton to the Vale of Evesham and even across the Severn into Wales) and the magnificent diversity of wild flowers lining the path in the spring and early summer. Once tasted, this slice of Cotswolds will never be forgotten." 

We finally circled around back to Stanton and it's church of St. Michael. It's been said that this church, dedicated to St. Michael (the archangel who fought the devil), sits upon a sacred pagan site. Stanton is actually at the intersection of two ley lines (geographic lines along which many prehistoric sights are found).

We ended the day watching the town's cricket game.  What a great last summer walk in one of my many favorite places in England! 

Click here for the map on directions for this walk.

Click here for information on more circular walks on the Cotswold way.

Encounters by Ivor Gurney

One comes across the strangest things in walks,
Fragment of Abbey tithe barns fixed in modern,
With Dutch-sort houses, where the water baulks
Weired up, and brick-kilns broken among fern.
Old troughs, great stone cisterns bishops might have blessed
And baptized from, most worthy mounting stones;
Black timber in red brick, surprisingly placed
Where hill stone was looked for, and a manor's bones
Spied in the frame of some wisteria'd house,
And mill-falls and sedge-pools, and Saxon faces
Stream sources happened upon in unlikely places
And Roman looking hills of small degree.
The surprise, the good in dignity of poplars
At a roads end, or the white Cotswold scars.
Sheets spread out spotless against the hazel tree.
But toothless old men, bubbling over with jokes
And deadly serious once the speaking finished.
Beauty is less after all than strange comical folks
And the wonder of them never and never can become diminished. 

Lower Slaughter Walk and Summer Fete

When we moved to Oxford 6 years ago, I was so excited that we would be only an hour from London.  I envisioned weekly trips to the city to enjoy all the London has to offer.  Once here, I discovered that Oxford sits on the edge of the Cotswolds, an area of extraordinary natural beauty and stunning villages built from honey-colored stones that look frozen in time - like they have been completely bypassed by the twenty first century. While I love spending time in London and Oxford, it's the Cotswolds and the English countryside that truly entice me and just make my heart sing.

Charming and quaint villages are one of the hallmarks of the Cotswolds. While each village has its own flavor, most of them share a common aesthetic thanks to the gorgeous Cotswold stone they are built from. It is this same stone that makes Oxford so lovely. 

Once voted the "Most Beautiful Village in the Cotswolds” Lower Slaughter is a perfect example of a Cotswold town.  The history of this and most Cotswold villages is evident in striking wool churches and manor houses built by wealthy textile merchants. And the textile wealth was built, in large part, on the slave trade as ships sailed from English ports to Africa, then to the Americas and back to England, filled with cotton to be turned into textiles in the mills throughout England.  

From Wikipedia: "During the Middle Ages, thanks to the breed of sheep known as the Cotswold Lion, the Cotswolds became prosperous from the wool trade with the continent, with much of the money made from wool directed towards the building of churches. The area still preserves numerous large, handsome Cotswold Stone "wool churches".  This is St Mary's Church in Lower Slaughter, a13th century Anglican parish church located on the edge of the village. The present church of St Mary's was rebuilt in 1867 when the earlier church fell into dis-repair. 

The earliest record of the village's Old Mill is found in the Doomsday Book of 1086. In the 14th Century it had begun to be known as Slaughter Mill and by the 18th Century had become independent of the manorial estate. By the way, the name Slaughter has nothing to do with livestock  or butchery - the name stems from the Old English name for a wet land 'slough' or 'slothre', what we would call mud.

We came to Lower Slaughter on the last Bank Holiday (3-day weekend) Monday in August.  The village was all dressed up for it's village fair or fete, as they say here.  I love English village fairs and this one was just perfect.  My favorite part was the local dog show. Each dog was a winner.  While only one dog won a ribbon for "best in show", all of them got a bone.  Lots of happy dogs - that's my kind of dog show.

This was one of the games at the fair.  You pick a boat and let is sail down the little Eye stream that runs through the town.  These are the straggler boats at the end of the competition.  

The starting line for the boat race.

There are countless wonderful hiking trails throughout the Cotswolds and one of my favorites is the gentle, mile-long stroll between the twin villages of Upper and Lower Slaughter.  It's a perfect combination of Cotswold villages, rolling hills, lovely county manor houses and cottages, farms and countryside, and, of course, sheep.

The name Cotswold is popularly attributed the meaning "sheep enclosure in rolling hillsides", incorporating the term wold which means hills. I know it to mean one of my favorite places in England. I'll never grow tired of Cotswold wandering.  I hope to wander back to the Slaughters again soon and I especially hope to come to the Fete again next summer.  While I saw the dog show this year, I missed the first part, the puppy show.  I have to come back for that. 

Let me know if you have a favorite Cotswold village or walk.  I'd love to know about it. 

Compton Verney

One of the many things I love about living in Oxford is that there are so many beautiful places to visit within an hour away by car.  Compton Verney is just such a place.  It's a lovely great manor house turned into an art gallery with a Capability Brown designed parkland.  In all ways, it is a feast for the eyes.

There has been a home on this sight for over a thousand years and it is referenced in the Domesday Book of 1086 (a survey and census carried out for the Norman king, William the Conqueror, to record land ownership and values).

As with most grand houses like this, it buildings have evolved over the centuries. The first surviving inventory of the house, which dates from the middle of the Civil War in 1642, describes a "house of thirty rooms including a hall, two parlours, seventeen bedrooms, an armoury and study as well as servants’ quarters and outbuildings". 

The house and landscape that is there today was shaped most notably by John Peyto-Verney who, around 1760, decided to remodel his mansion and garden. He hired Lancelot "Capability" Brown, England's most influential landscape architect to redesign the parkland.

In 1993 it was bought in a run-down state by the Peter Moores Foundation, a charity supporting music and the visual arts established by former Littllwoods chairman Sir Peter Moores. It was his vision to restore the property into a gallery capable of hosting international art exhibitions. Compton Verney Art Gallery is now run by Compton Verney House Trust.

The Park at Compton Verney that you see today is the result of an 11-year restoration project that is still ongoing to restore the landscape to the one that Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown designed in 1768.

Compton Verney has the largest collection of British folk art in the UK.

The British Portrait collection features portraits of royal and noble sitters from the first great era of British painting: the Tudor period (1485-1603) including Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Edward VI.

It is estimated that Capability Brown was responsible for over 170 gardens surrounding the finest country houses and estates in Britain, all designed and developed in the mid to late 1700's.  Click here for a map of the sites where Capability Brown is known or thought to have worked across the UK.  

Happy 301st Birthday today (30 August), Sir Lancelot "Capability" Brown!

I love this willow walk!

I also love this restored Icehouse which dates to around 1771. Ice houses were the forerunners to the refrigerator. They provided temperature regulated spaces, chilled down through the use of ice ‘cropped’ during the winter months. Clean ice would have been collected throughout the winter, and compacted into the insulating brick lined pit.

Across the lake from the house there is a geodesic dome called "The Clearing", a collaborative artwork by Alex Hartley and Tom James.  Here visitors can take workshops on how to live in the world affected by the social and climate change that’s coming our way.

 

Thank you to our dear friend, Kath and Ian, for introducing us to Compton Verney. All in all, it's a delightful place to visit. Whether you like art, beautiful old manor house, sweeping English landscapes, lunch or tea from locally grown farms, or as in my case, all of the above, there is something here for everyone.  

For more information about the house, click here and/or here.

For information about Capability Brown at Compton Verney click here.