The View Over Oxford

Oxford lies athwart the confluence of the Cherwell and Thames (or Isis) Rivers, and the Oxford Canal (see pictured below). A glance at a map of the city and its environs presents a tangle of waterways flowing in almost every conceivable direction. Fording one's oxen here would seem to me to have been a problem almost on the order of the seven famous bridges at Konigsberg; when I first arrived, I had a hard time knowing when I was on what side of what river as I came and went. Just now (we're told) all of Oxford's various canals, rivers, rivulets, rills and streams are "raging" due to the rains, which even the locals have been complaining are unusually unremitting this year. In fact, if the rivers hadn't swollen so much over the last few months, this past weekend - three days of calm, warm sun - would have been a perfect few days to go punting, which some of us have been interested in trying since we've arrived and before the University freshers descend on the town over the next week or so. So instead of poling here and there under the willows and acacias, I made use of our sunny respite and left the brimming banks and soggy flats along, around and over which Oxford has grown to take to the uplands that flank the Cherwell and Thames to the east and west. Channeling their winding streams separately in from the north and together toward London away to the south, these hills make a long, broad valley and offer a series of views of the "sweet city with her dreaming spires," in Matthew Arnold's well-worn phrase. Anent Arnold, a bit more in a moment. First, let me offer a few of my (somewhat more prosaic) pictures of Oxford's spires, gathered in these last rare, dry days (it's raining and chill again as I write) from the hills around town .

Here's the view approaching the heart of Wytham Wood, a University-owned preserve atop a steep ridge to the northwest of town.

This is just within Wytham Wood itself, rather more picturesque than the city from this vantage I think.

The following day I left the house in a rush a couple of hours after sunrise to get to South Park, which lies just to the east of the city, and a five minute bike ride up Southfield Rd from where I live. South Park offers a standard postcard view of the city, though I wanted to make my own version of it. Unfortunately, I found the grass rather wet, and the view obscured by what I had (beginning the day before at Wytham) begun to suspect was Oxford's smog problem. Here above, anyway, is my version of the view over Oxford the professionals somehow make to look like spun gold against emeralds.

For the rest of the day, following my breakfast-hour reconnaissance from South Park, I toiled up the higher hills further to the southest, traipsing up and down bridlepaths and narrow lanes, dodging cars (driven seemingly, as in a dream, by children, dogs, or absolutely no one, down the wrong side of the road) and avoiding backyards, trying to find a break in the trees through which I could get another view of the city. I knew it was just beyond where the branches closed in, but I failed for the rest of that afternoon or evening in making good on the altitude I'd gained. I saw a lot of the other side of Shotover Hill and beyond, including the modest burg of Wheatley, itself sitting just above the River Thame (a tributary of the Thames, originating in the town of Thame, to the north east), and along the Thame a mile more, the even more modest hamlet of Great Milton (somehow I missed Little Milton).

Here's the Great Milton commons on a balmy Saturday afternoon.

The next day, Sunday, I road off to the west again, though this time toward the south, and up Boars Hill, promised to me as the single best spot over which to survey Oxford. After a lackluster ride at the flanks of constant squadrons of Sunday drivers, I arrived at the crest of Boars Hill, and sure enough, there was Oxford, relatively resplendent at the notch between two grazed-over hillocks, the view helpfully pinned down by an interpretive plaque itself ensconced within a bay in the fence at the side of the road into the town of Boars Hill.

Here's the view from the road into Boars Hill.

I then drifted off into Boars Hill proper, thinking I might find a pub to start my reading of the Iliad for class the next day, or perhaps an unexpected opening over a clearing affording yet another view of the city?

Imagine my delight when I happened on just the thing: Jarn Mound, built by the Oxford Preservation Trust in 1929-1931, as the sign announcing it told me, "to preserve the view over Oxford." Indeed, the moving force behind the plan, Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos, planned the mound to include the view from Matthew Arnold's "signal-elm," which spot afforded a view over the Ilsley Downs (to the south), the Vale of White Horse (further to the south, through which runs the River Ock), the Thames, and Oxford. At any rate, I like a handful of others I saw there that day, dutifully mounted the steep, blocky steps up the unprepossessing Mound (called Jarn, apparently, through some local mangling of "Jardin", i.e. garden) only to find that any view it promised has long disappeared behind the exuberant upper stories of the woods around Boars Hill.

Here's the Mound from below, with the hint of the squat pillar atop which fades an interpretive map of what one should be able to see - a five-county panorama, no less - from the mound's apex.

Here is what I in fact did (or didn't) see having clambered up onto the interpretive plaque itself, at the apex of Jarn Mound. I made a promise to myself to return in the winter, after the leaves around the mound will have had their fill of the view and retire to give us a chance. At least I was able to enjoy the unintended irony in a somwhat fuller quotation of Arnold's An Oxford Elegy:

And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers:
That sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not summer for beauty's heightening
Lovely all times she lies, lovely today.

Indeed, she may need not summer or anything else, but nowadays it leaves the rest of us out of luck. (On another note, it's Jarn Mound that could use some heightening.)

At any rate, I did get to read a bit of the Iliad yesterday afternoon on Boars Hill, reclining in "Matthew Arnold's Field" (if I remember, another gift from the Oxford Preservation Trust), watching the blackberry pickers and picnickers in the generous sunlight.

And here is a pair of perfectly picnicky Oxonians (?) come to find out what I am up to on my side of the shade tree we shared.