Oxfordshire

I was able to explore a little on my second day in Faringdon, walking to the folly (tower) that's the main landmark.

It was closed for renovations but I wouldn't have climbed to the top anyway; just walking there used up most of my energy, and I sat for a while on a bench looking out over the Oxfordshire countryside and eating an excellent cheddar and chutney sandwich from the shop next to the inn. (I somehow managed to get completely lost trying to get back to the center of town, and found myself wandering through fields instead of quaint Cotswold streets, so it was a good thing I'd fortified myself beforehand.)

All Saints

This 12th century church was around the corner from the inn in Faringdon. I wasn't able to go inside, but I did like that headstone about to topple into the path, and the oddly jaunty pennants over the graveyard.

The church lost its spire to a Royalist cannonball during the English Civil War, and I'm not sure why they haven't built another in the almost 400 years since. Maybe it's just the cachet of being able to say Cromwell did that, as two different residents asked me if I'd seen the church and told me about the cannonball during my brief time walking around the town.

Faringdon

This is the main street in Faringdon, a historic market town on the edge of the Cotswolds, about 20 miles from Oxford.

I ended up staying there for two nights after my case of suspected appendicitis derailed my plans to go to Yorkshire. I spent the last night of the Oxford program in the John Radcliffe Hospital, and when the surgeon agreed to release me the next day, it was “on a lead”—on the condition that I stay in Oxford for the next 48 hours and return to the hospital immediately if my symptoms got worse. Unfortunately, that meant that I had to find a last-minute hotel room in Oxford on a summer weekend, ideally one that wouldn't cost as much as an Uber to Yorkshire. (I had actually checked the cost earlier that morning, when the painkillers and anti-nausea drugs had kicked in and I was delusional enough to think that maybe I could still go to Haworth if I just didn't have to haul my luggage on and off the three trains the usual journey entailed. It would have cost £700, and I wasn't delusional enough to be willing to pay that, even before I'd received the doctor's orders not to leave town.)

So that is how I ended up in Faringdon. After I was discharged, I took an Uber back to Merton, where they had kindly delayed clearing out my room. I took a shower, checked out Hotels.com and decided that Faringdon, though not technically Oxford, was close enough, and more importantly, had an available room in an old coaching inn at a reasonable price.

The town is charming, the inn was lovely, and once the Uber dropped me off I crawled into the very comfortable bed and slept for twelve hours.

Great Tew

Winding up the Cotswolds (at least for now) in Great Tew. We took a country lane out of town and circled back through a field, where a pair of curious horses checked us out for potential treats and then wandered off, disappointed.

More Lower Slaughter

Houses along the River Eye in the village. The river looked like more of a stream to my unprofessional eye, but there was enough water to make it worthwhile for the Victorians to build the water wheel on the left. The brick building is also Victorian, but the adjoining stone building has been there long enough to appear in the Domesday Book.

And yes, there is an Upper Slaughter, but alas we did not visit.

Back to Lower Slaughter

Since I'm here in blogland, let's take a quick visit back to Lower Slaughter in the Cotswolds, and the picturesque church of St Mary's.

When you find yourself in the real life Acorn TV

After lunch in Bourton, I wandered down the side streets away from the water. The building on the left was a hotel or inn, but I preferred to think it was the manor house of some outwardly respectable characters whose dark secrets would inevitably lead to murder.

And when Inspector Morse turned up to investigate, he would be pleased to learn that there was an attractive pub just across the street.

The Discovered Cotswolds

The name of the tour I took was The Undiscovered Cotswolds, and although it was a lovely day and the places we were visiting were highly scenic, none of them were crowded. I didn't really appreciate this until we stopped for lunch in Bourton on the Water and learned where all the missing tourists had gone.

The guide apologized for this, but explained that we stopped there because there were numerous good restaurants, tearooms, and pubs to choose from.

I admit that my own lunch consisted of some scrumptious gelato, eaten in the shade under a tree, and I found I didn't mind the crowds one bit.

Urban, well, Cotswolds poetry

I do love a nice alleyway. This narrow stone passage leads off the main square in Stow on the Wold.

Classes start tomorrow, so posting will probably be sporadic over the next week or two. I went in to make copies yesterday, and forgot to bring the last document I had printed out, so today I have the choice of schlepping to the Upper East Side again, or printing 36 copies on my little home printer and manually collating and stapling them. I'm going with the second option, because the time I save by having the copy machine print, collate and staple will be more than offset by all the travel time, and I still have a lot of prep to do. Plus I can watch TV while I staple.

The Mitfords

St Mary's was the parish church of the famous Mitford sisters, four of whom are buried in the churchyard. The tombstones are so weathered they can hardly be read, but that's a closeup of the novelist (or “Authoress”) Nancy Mitford's grave on the left. The picture on the right shows the graves of Nancy, the Hitler-stalking Unity, and the vile Diana.

I had to check Wikipedia when I got home to confirm that Unity's middle name had really been Valkyrie, and that it wasn't just some affectation she had adapted after becoming obsessed with Hitler. Not only was that really her name, but she was apparently conceived in a town called Swastika, in Ontario, while her parents were investigating a local gold mine as a possible investment.

More of the Fettiplaces

The Fettiplace family

In addition to the usual memorial plaques in the floor and on the walls, there are six remarkable effigies of members of the Fettiplace family from the 17th century, each resting on one elbow and looking quite relaxed. They're stacked like bookshelves, three high, on one side of the altar. It must be fun trying to preach a sermon with these fellows staring at you.

The new(ish) window

This is the window put together from the pieces of medieval glass salvaged after the explosion.

A perfect English country church

St Mary's church in Swinbrook is quite small; it's hard to imagine more than forty or fifty parishioners being able to comfortably sit in the pews. Most of the building dates from the 12th or 13th century, except for a tower added in the 1800's. That large plain glass window is very striking, and I love how much light it lets into the interior. (The panes of glass were blown out by a land mine in 1940, but the medieval glass was collected and incorporated into another window.)

Cotswold dry stone walls

An especially pretty example of the stone walls common in the Cotswolds. They're built with no mortar, just stacking layer upon layer of flat stones horizontally, and finishing with a layer of vertical coping stones to help hold it together.

Repurposing

I love this—the traditional red phone boxes are mostly gone now, just like pay phones in the U.S., but many of them have been repurposed into mini-libraries, or, like this one, a defibrillator in case of emergency.

An animal distraction

Fortunately there was a pair of donkeys in the field next to the ruins or I might have taken another hundred pictures of archways.

Arches

More Minster Lovell Hall

Minster Lovell Hall

This was our last stop on the Cotswolds tour. After a long day of quaint cottages and village streets, who wouldn't enjoy a good ruin?

The hall was built by William, Baron Lovell, in the 1430's. Unfortunately it didn't remain in the family for long; William's grandson Francis was a supporter of Richard III and after Richard's defeat at Bosworth, the property was seized by the Crown. It was abandoned and dismantled for building stone in the 1700's, and has been a ruin ever since.