a pilgrimage

When we were planning our trip to Oxford, the Systems Administrator suggested that we could take in a garden on the way back, and I instantly said that we must go and see Rousham.  The SA asked what that was and I replied that it was a very important early example of the English landscape movement, designed by William Kent, which left the SA not a lot the wiser.  In the Turf Tavern I was asked what sort of garden we were going to see tomorrow, exactly, and replied rather vaguely that it was an exercise in laying out space, and very green.  That was about all I knew about Rousham, having never been there, but only read about it in books and seen it on TV.  It is one of only two English gardens that Monty Don included in his tour of 80 world gardens.

We both fell in love with Rousham, and the SA saw at once why I had been so adamant that we had to go to a garden with almost no flowers that most people have never heard of.  Rousham is in private hands, very much so.  There are no brown tourist signs directing you there from the main road.  If you don't understand the significance of the place name then you don't need to go there.  Although the garden is open all year round there is no tea room, no gift shop, no guide book, and you get your tickets out of a machine.  Children under the age of 15 are not allowed.  You squeeze into the car park through a gate in a Kent-designed eighteenth century stable block, are directed by small austere hand-painted signs in the direction of the ticket machine, the lavatories and the garden, and that's it.  There are no signs telling you to beware unfenced ponds, or be careful on slippery slopes, although there is a small step like a monumental trip-hazard right outside the ladies loo.  You are treated like grown ups, and you are on your own.  We were entirely on our own for our first circuit of the garden, since we arrived at ten on the dot when it opened, and we never saw any other visitors for the first half hour, and not more than a dozen others in total, which is not a bad stocking rate for a 25 acre garden.

We were sent around the side of the house, which gives you a splendid view out across the park, which contained a couple of imposingly large long horned cattle, reassuringly on the other side of the ha ha.  We found  a large, plain, level lawn with a marvellous bulging mixed hedge of yew reinforced with patches of holly and box, which were all similar in colour but very different in texture.  From the small and difficult to read map on our free leaflet we gathered that we had to go past a clipped holly tree at the far corner of the lawn.  Beyond that we found William Kent's garden.  Paths snaked around the sides of a slope, some broad and inviting, others narrow ribbons of hoggin across grass studded with primroses.  Trees underplanted with solid masses of clipped laurel and box made green masses between the paths.  Every view ended in a classical statue or small stone built temple or pavilion.

Most thrilling of all, and the iconic image that was my central reason for wanting to see Rousham, a narrow rill, scarcely more than 30cm across, emerged from a hole in the ground at the top of a steepish slope, snaked down the centre of a path between flanks of laurel, flowed over a gently protruding lip into an octagonal pond, then continued on the far side of the pond until it met a far larger octagonal pond in the middle of the valley.  That was perfect.  It is such an unexpected sight, to find a small, formal stream in the middle of a formal path in the middle of a wood.  The idea must originally have owed something to Italian renaissance gardens and the gardens of the islamic world, and the much larger version at the Welsh botanic garden must owe something to Rousham, but Kent's rill is perfect.  Rather bafflingly, it doesn't get a photograph in the three pages of Monty's book of the series that he devotes to Rousham.

There are beautiful views out across the river Cherwell and the meadows beyond it, and a sham ruin built as an eye catcher sits square in the middle of the view from the house.  The text books say that Rousham is an early UK example of borrowed landscape.  It is a slight pity that the landscape they have to borrow nowadays includes a railway line across the centre ground.  The little passenger trains aren't so bad, but the freight trains make quite a racket.  The SA later told me, after checking out an oddly familiar name on one of the road signs around Rousham, that it was now quieter than it used to be, as until about fifteen years ago it was two miles from the end of the runway of a US heavy bomber base.

There are a couple of fine walled gardens by the house, largely laid to grass now.  To fill them with vegetable production would require an army of gardeners, and an army of people to eat the vegetables.  There are some beautifully trained fruit trees, including a vast fan up the side of the circular dovecote, which contains doves.  The door was open, so I peered inside, though the quantity of guano was sufficient to deter me from going any further.  There was a wooden ladder like fruit pickers use, mounted on an arm attached to a central pole, which presumably revolves to allow you to climb up and reach any part of the inside of the dovecote to take the squabs.  The doves themselves fly in and out through a neat little wooden cupola.  There is a box parterre, planted up with roses which weren't doing much yet, and as we sat on a bench in front of a sunny wall contemplating it all we heard the voices of the gardeners through a hedge, debating how to clean something.  We couldn't work out what 'it' was, but it was evidently disgusting.

Rousham is a beautiful, perfect place.  If you are travelling anywhere near Oxford do try and go there.

a trip down memory lane

We are off to Oxford in an hour or two for an overnight stay.  The Systems Administrator suggested the trip originally as a birthday outing, and I had to confess that we couldn't go away for the SA's actual birthday because I had agreed to do a woodland charity talk in Thundersley the night before, and was working the day after.  I did run the talk past the SA at the time, but it failed to register as at that point we weren't thinking of going anywhere.  When I told my mother we were going to Oxford she looked slightly confused and said, oh, is it a gaudy? but it isn't, just a sudden desire to revisit the scenes of our youth.

I don't think the SA has been back to Oxford at all since our graduation ceremony in the autumn of 1983.  I've been back twice that I can remember, both flying visits.  I don't know exactly why the SA wants to go now, but maybe I'll find out over the next couple of days.  We don't have much of a tourist agenda.  We'll look at our old college, and the college where my father was a fellow and where I was born, and have a drink in the Turf Tavern where we used to go in our courting days.  (I was a cheap date, being genuinely happy with halves of bitter).  We'll probably look at the botanical gardens, not because they hold any special associations or because we are avid Philip Pullman fans (we're not, though I have read the books) but because it is the oldest botanic garden in England, and we always go and look at the botanical gardens if possible when we visit anywhere.  I have gracefully conceded that we needn't go and look at Howard Hodgkin's collection of Indian art in the Ashmolean, since it's not my birthday, and the SA isn't interested in Indian art.  We could try the new rooftop restaurant, though, which somebody at the music society tells me is very good.

We could look at the covered market, which would bring back memories of youthful purchases of cheese and ground coffee.  We will probably spend a lot of time wandering about the streets and staring at the colleges and the Radcliffe Camera.  I suspect that compared to the Oxford of my memories it might all look very small.  We might go and have another drink in the Turf Tavern.

In truth I don't remember very much.  I think I enjoyed it at the time, so I don't think this is due to a process of repression, like Ari Folman suppressing all memories of Sabra and Shatila.  It's just that it was a long time ago, and since then my life has taken a path a long way from academia, and it doesn't seem to have all that much to do with the person I am now, so I don't think about it very often.  My memories of Oxford are pretty unreliable anyway.  As a devoted watcher of Inspector Morse back in the 90s my visual memory of the streets is hopelessly mixed up with what I saw on the screen, which in turn combined and moved around features of different colleges and roads, so that it didn't correspond to any reality on the ground.  And further back than that my undergraduate life was superimposed on faint memories of early childhood, so my 1980s Oxford sits on a 1960s one, and was covered over with a fantasy version.

I didn't live in Oxford for long.  We moved to the West Country when I was four and a quarter, and spent a year before that in America (where my pa was a distinguished visiting professor).  I can remember our garden in the house against the city walls in Holywell Street, the fascination of watching a horse crapping in the road outside the front door, and the thrill of a visit to a hardware store (a taste for the smell of compost and galvanised iron remains with me to this day).  I remember (I think) my grandmother's house, very faintly, and being scolded for pulling some kittens by the tail (I didn't realise I was being cruel, it was before I learned to have empathy with cats), and being told to keep an eye on the purse in the shopping basket of whatever female minder was taking me shopping, and feeling very mortified when it was stolen, and surprised when the grown ups decreed that I was not to blame and that it was an unreasonable request to have made to a small child.  I remember my mother going away twice, once I think for the birth of my brother (which was conducted in hospital after a fright with me on college premises) and once to go to a conference in Africa (which I think was about a railway).  I remember some very loud wallpaper (think that was in the dining room) and tricycling around Rose Lane.  That is partly why I would like to go to the Botanical Garden, to imagine my toddler self, tricycling about.