Look on my works, ye walkers, and despair

Beauty on the Harwell campus doesn't exactly jump out at you, but it is there if you know where to look. It helps if the Ballardian post-apocalyptic nature-reclaims-the-works-of-man vibe presses your buttons, like it presses mine.

Tucked away in the north west corner of the site there's a network of man-made roads being extremely reclaimed: now useful for tasks like teaching Junior Godson to ride his bike (a few years ago) or just strolling on a Sunday afternoon (us, today).

This used to be Hillside.


The odd modern-ish road sign suggests they were in use relatively recently ...



... and indeed (I'm told) up until about 20 years ago this was a post-war prefab residential area. In places the road is all but gone, with only the occasional concrete path leading up to a square clearing of moss in the bushes that once was someone's home - often with interesting displays of feral ox-eye daisies where the flower beds have burst free of their banks.

[UPDATE: My copy of Harwell: The Enigma Revealed tells me this was once the Aldfield estate, built in 1946 by German POWs. The prefabs were such desirable property that in one case an engineer's wife stood on the concrete base while the house was assembled around her, in case someone pinched it. They were lovely in summer and freezing in winter, as the walls consisted of two metal sheets with a 4-inch air gap and that was all. A programme to demolish them began in 1986 and by 1991 all were gone. Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs lived at no. 17 Hillside.]

I find it interesting to see how obviously fertile the area is in its natural state. Twenty years after the great plague, Abingdon will probably look a bit like this. Actually, if I was a spaceman who landed here I might conjecture that civilisation had been destroyed by the weird triffid-like thistles that flourish so happily (see foreground, right).

If I was a spaceman I would definitely want to investigate this feature if I spotted it from orbit. It's the end of Thames Rd in the map above ...

... and looks to me like somewhere that the original inhabitants might have used as a launchpad. Maybe they did. Not much to see from ground level, though.


The two-hour lump of cinematic cheese that is Logan's Run redeems itself with a five minute section where Logan and Jessica come across the post-apocalypse ruins of Washington DC, and marvel at such wonders as an overgrown Lincoln Memorial and Capitol, which unlike the rest of the movie actually look quite convincing. At one point they slosh through a marshy swamp, the camera pans around and we realise they're wading down the Reflecting Pool in front of the Washington Monument.

(Image (c) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976, and taken from this site, which has many more.)

That's a bit what it's like in the top left corner of Harwell. But only a bit. Or possibly a bit like my favourite part of Prince Caspian, where the Pevensie kids explore the ruins of Cair Paravel.

Wytham wandering

The purpose of trees is to provide blessed shade as you stroll along on a hot summer's afternoon. Any other purpose is useful but secondary. Put enough trees together and you get woods. Put the woods on a hill overlooking Oxford and you get Wytham Woods.

It's an access-controlled SSSI, and even though I don't think there are any reasonable bars to anyone getting a permit, it makes it just a bit more peaceful and remote than, say, Shotover (despite the best efforts of our friends from Brize Norton to bring a little low-level noise into our lives). Every now and again you turn a corner and suddenly find yourself with a panoramic view of the dreaming spires, and wish you'd brought the proper camera rather than just the phone.

The phone camera also failed to do full justice to the hitherto unknown pastime of caterpillar bungee-jumping.

That glowing blob is not a crack in space-time: it is in fact a small green caterpillar about 3cm in length, dangling in the middle of the road by a strand of silk so fine it seems to be levitating. Closer up:

And there were a lot of them. Whether they were trying to get down or up or just dangling to pass the time of day, I have no idea. However they do it at about face level so it's a good way of grabbing the attention of passers by.

Current reading is Avilion by Robert Holdstock, last of the Mythago Wood series, which gives all sorts of added resonances to walking through a piece of undisturbed ancient woodland, and makes you realise that living somewhere like this:

... could be a very bad idea indeed.

He also does stations and memorials

Clifton Hampden bridge, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott: him as also did St Pancras, lots of churches, and memorials to the Martyrs (Oxford) and Albert (London). According to the guide book of walks around Oxfordshire, it replaced a ferry across the Thames and was privately commissioned by a local family.

"I say, dear, who do we know who does a bit of building?"

I completely agree that if a job is worth doing then it's worth over-doing.

The house at the end might be nice to live in, though I'm not sure I would enjoy having high water flood marks in my back garden. Even less would I enjoy people being able to look down into my back garden and say "oh look, you can see where the water comes up to."

A whole in my mind

I have fragmented knowledge of bits of Oxford. The Wycliffe area. St Giles. Broad Street, the High Street ... I very rarely travel from one to the other, though. I make each one my destination for whatever purpose, and go there and back again. So, how do all those fragments fit together?

I could look at a map, or, I could walk it.

Park the car at Wycliffe. Along Norham Gardens and then down through the University Parks to the High Street, via St Cross Road - a handy back-alley route I didn't know and the first of the threads to link the different bits together. Past Magdalen and over the bridge, hanging a left to St Clements and the Islamic Centre, looking suitably Islamic as it towers over the leafy green trees.


Then turn left just before the Magdalen Sports Ground and you're in Mesopotamia - a shaded walk between two streams of the Cherwell, a mill stream and the natural channel, named with impeccably accurate Oxonian clever-gitness as Mesopotamia means "between rivers". The walk is along a concrete causeway with overgrown banks on either side. You join at the point where the two streams merge again and the upper one pours down in a weir, so the air blowing at you down the alley is cool and moist. After that, though, you begin to see that it rained quite heavily earlier in the weekend - not a sign of it now, but it's all evaporating and the air hemmed in by the overhanging undergrowth is humid.

You follow this as far as the point where the two streams diverge in the first place. The slipway with rollers at top left is presumably for getting punts between the two levels, but to my fevered imagination I could see it being an emergency punt launching device, for those occasions when the punt has to be in the water now.


And then you're back in the University Parks again, walking up the Cherwell, and a couple more fragments have been sewn together. But you're only just starting the trip into terra incognita because now you cross the river again and strike out for points east, or Marston, whichever comes sooner. This is the flood plain of the Cherwell, completely flat, immaculate sports ground on one side and overgrown grazing-and-hay-making-meadow on the other. You cross fields and go down more leafy tracks, and even though it's completely unknown you see things like the minarets and a cluster of trees in the middle of the sports ground and the roof of the JR - each line of sight a further thread to bind the whole. Then through Marston itself, deciding not to look at the inside of the 12th century church, round in a big anticlockwise circle via the Victoria Arms on the Cherwell, which you do decide to look inside. Oh, so that's what this place is. I punted here on a company social once, but obviously I came by river. Anyway. Now you're heading back down the Cherwell again and suddenly, presto, you're back in the University Parks and on the way back to the car.

Then home, via Summertown and Wolvercote. A final binding thread around the top of the town.

Six miles, apart from the driving bit, according to the book of walks; lovely weather; and not one hayfevery sniffle. How a Sunday afternoon should be.

C.S.I. Cumnor

Only 10 miles walked this weekend - we must be slipping. 4 around Watlington on Saturday to demonstrate the red kites to my parents, and 6 around Cumnor on Sunday, finishing to gaze in awe at a stone fireplace in a churchyard.

The kites obligingly went through their paces, swooping and diving and soaring like they were being paid for it. Go up Watlington Hill and you can look down on them swooping and diving etc, which is even more fun. Beautiful, fantastic birds, and even though I had exactly nothing to do with their extinction, reintroduction or subsequent success I do feel immensely proud of them.

The Cumnor fireplace is an Elizabethan crime scene, the site of a scandal that rocked England at the time. Amy Robsart, wife of the Queen's favourite Robert Dudley, fell mysteriously to her death down a staircase in Cumnor Place, after which he was not perceived to act as a grieving husband ought. Cumnor Place was pulled down in 1810 and its site is now an overflow graveyard next to the church. The fireplace is set into a bank and is all that's left of the building.

Robert may not have valued his wife that much. At the top of Watlington Hill we unexpectedly encountered what I'm guessing was a local mosque picnic, 10 or so families with the girl children already sporting headscarves on top of the usual kid attire and the women utterly featureless in full hijab. Some at least allowed to show faces, some with just the eyeslits. What the kites made of all the penguins, I don't know. Left wondering exactly what kind of culture regards women as irresistably tempting, wanton, slutty etc if they don't have everything but the eyes covered up. You can value your wife too much, too.

But no Turkish Delight

Boar's Hill on a subzero January day does a passable imitation of Narnia towards the end of the Witch's reign.


Look close and you see that everything is picked out in lines of frost. It's like the setting on Adobe Illustrator where you can reduce a picture down to a line drawing.




At one point we crossed over a small stream trickling down between two of these exquisitely outlined frosty banks, leading me (sorry) to start gibbering "Aslan is coming! Aslan is coming!"

The event: friend DW, who I must have known for a good decade or more (as opposed to DW, who I've known since about 2001 or DW who I've known since about 2004) has a birthday at this time of year and always organises a birthday walk with friends drawn from all walks of his life. Ten years ago the group was exclusively adult but suddenly babies started happening, all mysteriously at the same time, leading to a group of kids all about the same age (and mostly male, for some reason).


DW isn't actually giving them communion, just chocolate coins which are of course renowned for their warming effect.

From the Fox, through some fields and frosty woods that are still primeval Oxfordshire and where wolves really ought to prowl, up to Jarn Mound to look at what would have been quite a view if the mist hadn't been there, then back to the Fox for a warming luncheon. Hardier souls continued with part 2 of the walk, less hardy or those with some serious blogging to do peeled off and headed home.

It just wouldn't have been the same without the frost, but now we've done that, we can have the warm weather now, thanks.

Doing the Watlington Walk (with a circular dead sheep)

Okay, we didn't do the Sarsen Walk. In previous years it's been combined with a visit to the parental home, but for various reasons that wouldn't work this time round. And we didn't fancy getting up to get to Avebury by 8 a.m., walking across Salisbury Plain and driving back home again.

So we did Watlington Walk no. 3, one of several kindly provided by the good folk of Watlington to help you enjoy the Chilterns. A fraction of the length of the Sarsen Walk, but a perfectly acceptable substitute. We missed out on crossing the highest point in Wiltshire, but on the other hand we got to walk up Watlington Hill and get really quite astonishing views across Oxfordshire instead. And we must have seen upwards of fifty red kites, soaring and hovering with their six foot wing span sometimes only 20 or 30 feet above the ground. They're carrion eaters, but so gorgeous to look at that you really can't complain. It did dawn on me that my hat is made of sheep leather and they were maybe trying to work out if the circular dead sheep ambling through the countryside below them was worth a nibble. None of them chanced it.


By the famous White Mark of Watlington (why is it famous? Because Watlington says so; don't argue) we saw two deer with such an appalling sense of self-preservation I can only assume they were teenagers. They didn't even hear us approach, and we weren't trying to hide. The thought processes of the nearest deer must have gone something like:

Nom nom nom nom nom [holds head up; totally fails to see us] nom nom nom nom nom [holds head up again] OMG humans! What do I do now? Hmm. Yes. Good one. Let's see. They don't look that dangerous. They're not pointing long thin things at me. Should I go back to nom nom nom? Maybe not. I'll ... um ... I know, I'll lift up one of my front legs as if I was about to make a bolt for it. (But who am I kidding? This Chiltern grass is just so nomsome.) No, they're still not making a move. I'll ... I'll make a run just in case ... [scarpers for about ten feet, barely making the cover of the trees, stops and looks back] They're still just standing there. Aw, they look so cute. I know, I'll go and tell my friend about them, even though it means exposing my full flank to them for about ten seconds while I wander over to him. Hey, Frank, look what I found!

Frank: OMG humans!

Yes, that's what I was thinking. What shall we do?

Frank: ooh, hang on, I read about just this situation in a book once. All things considered, we should probably run.

[Together they make a half hearted dash for the trees. Stop and look back again. We take a step forward]

Eek! [Exeunt as if pursued by Ben]

And we may do another tomorrow.