A couple more days here in Oxford, exploring the area and finding new lanes and paths. My foot is less sore, the infection is healing so I decided to start working in my new shoes and walked to church yesterday morning. It was a breezy, grey morning so I wanted to see if I could find a short cut to the other side of the ‘village’. Headington isn’t really a village anymore, it’s been absorbed by the growth of the city of Oxford. It’s one of the many leafy suburbs surrounding the university center, but it still retains its own character and plenty of history fills its streets and paths.
I was only a few doors away from the house, and a mile from the church, and heard the church bells very faintly on the breeze. I turned a corner to cut through the park near the hospital, and saw a magnificent English oak tree. Huge with beautiful twisted branches. My favorite tree - all oaks really. I had to take a photo, but quickly put my phone back in my pocket because my hands were cold. The bells were clearer now. I followed the worn path through the grass of the park, quicker than the paved path around the perimeter, and popped out on a street I didn’t recognize. I started walking but heard the bells had grown fainter. Confused, I turned around to retrace my steps and the bells grew louder, calling out with their commanding clangs. I had turned the wrong way; I realized this without looking at the map app on my phone but instead was guided by the ancient sound of being drawn forward by the church bells. It was a fun game then to navigate my way by the growing insistence of the ringing bells, a pathway created by sound. I ended up discovering little narrow byways I hadn’t been on before. I passed houses with blue circles marking homes of people who had done some important thing, pretty vine covered cottages, and eventually came to St. Andrew’s church.
I made it to the churchyard, and I hope my technology skills will work to give you a sense of the excited call of the bells: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ynygo60CZjE?ra=m
The service was lovely, the sermon enlightening, the tea and cake afterwards welcoming and yummy. I continued on my morning to the shop to pick up some potatoes for our roast chicken dinner (it’s Sunday, always a roast on Sunday). I noticed a tiny gap between houses with a sign ‘Cuckoo Lane’, and not too far down it a very low bridge crossing over the narrow path. I was intrigued so I took it.
It is a straight, stone-wall lined path, plants often covering the walls, a second low bridge; it’s a very useful alternative from the busier streets. There was a familiarity to it, and I thought that here was a pathway, a public right of way, that has likely been walked for many, many years. I realized that it must keep going all the way to Oxford’s center, and it was most likely the original countryside path, once through fields and pastures, beside farmhouses, connecting Headington village to the bigger town. I had been on paths like this, still rural in their nature. Cuckoo Lane had been surrounded by suburbia.
It was a quick way back home, and a quiet, delightful one too. I did some googling when I was back at the house, while Rachel was preparing our delicious roast dinner and I put my feet up (the new shoes were great, no painful rubbing, but still need to rest them when I can.) Cuckoo Lane is indeed an old, well-trodden path. Believed to be over a thousand years old, local people having been using it as the most direct and pleasant route to Oxford for a long time. It shows on maps since at least the early 1600’s. A man bought land on one side of it for his house and the fields on the other side in the 1800s, and built the walls high and the bridges across so he could have his privacy. Somehow it was saved from being destroyed by being built on or widened to become a modern road. I am becoming deeply fascinated by the paths we make through millions of footsteps, and how they endure and evolve over centuries. Where we choose to step makes a difference.
Rachel had to go to London today, so I did a few things around the house to try to pay back in infinitesimally small ways my gratitude to Rachel and Jordan: watering, taking the garbage out, dropping a bag off at a neighbors, etc. And I watched the red kite. It just sits and sits in the big tree at the end of the garden, screaming occasionally when other birds come too near. It’s like a nature documentary right in front of me.
