A walk up the hill out of town - May 6, 2012

Burford, Oxfordshire

Sunday



Just steps from the town of Burford - and it is a town not a village - you're out in the beautiful countryside smelling the earth. I wanted to explore the group of buildings on the hill across the bridge. As usual, the off-pavement walk was my favourite.

The bridge just past the traffic signals crosses the 40 mile long river Windrush.

I passed by this pretty corner yard, crossed the road by a roundabout...

...and found a footpath. England has the most interesting gates / barriers to negotiate.

The path was lined with buttercups.

What is this place? I still don't know, but have the idea that technically it's not part of Burford, though I could be wrong.

Wandering around looking for a sign of any kind. It was nice and warm here.

On the internet I read there is: 'a network of dry stone walls at least in length equivalent to the Great Wall of China.' I presume they mean in the Cotswolds in general.

I felt like I was in France, not that I've been to France.

Luckily I paid attention to how to get back to the path.

 A wall within fences.

Some planes flew over from the airshow south of Oxford - lots of streaks in the sky. If Glenn had been with me, maybe we would have gone.

The steeple stands out from this viewpoint.

Cottage names & doors, Burford

One door

Three doors

Four doors

Four doors

Moving over to Burford - May 6, 2012

I loaded up the little car and said 'Hasta la vista' to the unhomey B&B in Oxford.

The town parking lot in Burford is just down the hill to the right of this bulding. I checked into the B&B and went exploring.

Pictures of the main street; the one with the tractor taken later in the day.

I headed off the main street to the right again in search of the church I'd seen the day before. This was the first time I saw the name Staddle Stones, but thought it was the name of the place. More on that later. A pleasant woman said hello on her way into the property.

Lots of people were outside the church when I arrived, so I wandered around the grounds for a while. I couldn't fit in the whole building with my camera.

The bottom two pictures in this group of four are of a complex that appeared to be an old folks home. If you had to be in such a place, this wouldn't be bad, right in Burford.

A break before further explorations.

The Priory B&B, Burford, Oxfordshire

The Priory is mainly a restaurant, but now rooms are rented in buildings lining the courtyard in the back. They were booked completely as of the following Thursday so that determined the number of nights I would be staying in Burford (4). I was fortunate to find such a place. I wrote then that the room was around £40-50 a night including breakfast, a bargain by Burford's standards. Most hotels and B&Bs were booked up for at least part of the weekend, and prices quoted for them were mind-boggling. Burford House: £270-300. The available suite at The Bay Tree Hotel: £245 on Sunday, £174 on Monday. In Canadian dollars that would be about $280 to $480. I checked other B&Bs but had no luck.

On Sunday my room was one with a shared bathroom...

...but the next day I could move across the courtyard to a larger room with an all-important ensuite bathroom.

The courtyard

The rooms didn't come with a hair dryer. One of the young waitresses said there might be one around but she would bring in her better model from home. That's what I liked about this place - the people were so friendly and accommodating.

It likely wouldn't have been Glenn's cup of tea, being rather basic and rustic, but then that was part of its charm. It was certainly adequate and more lively (even though for two of the four nights I was the only one staying there) than the B&B in Oxford, and the rooms were much more spacious. He would have hated the shower in the 2nd room which was the kind we found in Greece - a shower open to the whole bathroom. The biggest drawback to this B&B was that there was no internet connection. Burford isn't a town that has Starbucks and the like. The only public place I could find for emailing was at the library but their times were very limited. However, the location of this B&B couldn't be more ideal - at the bottom of the hill, right on the main street.

A trip out to Burford May 5, 2012

Oxfordshire - Cotswolds

My third and last day in Oxford was spent out of Oxford, namely in Burford because I still needed to figure out where I would stay next. This was my first adventure in driving in England, other than bringing the car up through town to the B&B the day before.

Although I'd studied the highway guide, encountering a double roundabout right away threw me for a loop. Driving on the other side of the road didn't bother me, and having the gear shift on the left made sense and felt natural, but I dreaded roundabouts and probably groaned aloud many times when a sign warned of one ahead, which happened frequently. Sometimes I'd get so focused on them, I'd forget that England has traffic lights as well. It wasn't just a matter of negotiating the traffic in roundabouts - some with multiple lanes, it was trying to figure out which turnoff to take. Often the signs wouldn't name the place I was looking for. I sure missed having my navigatoralong.

We have the luxury of space in North America and can be a little sloppy in our driving. In England, the tiny spaces in which people would cram their cars amazed me - they seem to know the exact width of their cars, because they have to. They also tend to drive like bats out of hell and it seems you can't go anywhere without a vehicle being behind you. That said, there were times that I really enjoyed the free-wheeling drives along country roads in the Cotswolds (sometimes without much traffic), while listening to Oxford Radio. Those are among my happiest memories.

I think it was on this outing, after the double roundabout, that I got slightly lost and wound up in a most beautiful spot. I don't know where or what it was but there was a collection of stone houses hidden away in the hilly terrain. The sun was out then. It was a magnificent sight - like a fairytale land. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nowhere to pull off to take a photo. 

Where are the Cotswolds? Their general area is shown on the left-hand map.

From the net, edited:
The Cotswolds are a range of hills in southwestern and west-central England, an area 25 miles across and 90 miles long (40 x 145 km for anyone who thinks in metric). The area has been designated as the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The highest point in the range is Cleeve Hill at just over 1000 ft, north of Cheltenham. The spine of the Cotswolds runs southwest to northeast through six counties. The area is characterized by attractive small towns and villages built of the underlying Cotswold stone - limestone rich in fossils. In the Middle Ages the wool trade made the area prosperous. Some of the money was put into the building of churches so the area has a number of large and handsome Cotswold stone 'wool churches'.

Why Burford, 'gateway to the Cotswolds'? It looked like an easy drive being fairly close to Oxford - about 20 miles west, it is a town as opposed to a village, and I liked the look of it in pictures.

Again, from the net:
Burford is situated in north Oxfordshire. Its High Street slopes from the high Wolds... where there are beautiful views over the open countryside, down to the willow fringed River Windrush in the pretty Windrush valley. A fine three arched medieval bridge crosses the river at the foot of the hill.

From the top of the hill I felt as though I was driving into a storybook. (I was stopped in traffic jam here - a common occurrence in Burford.)

'My' little Fiat was virtually new and fun to drive. I managed to find the parking lot down the hill and off a back street to the right.

One of three large gentry houses in Burford, built between 1695 and 1710 by John Castle, a prosperous Burford physician. I don't know what it is now.

Nice soft-coloured stone. Apparently the colour tends to be darker in the northern Cotswolds.

 Heading back to the car - I will check out that church another day.

The brilliant yellow fields of rapeseed, on the road between Burford and Oxford.