COUNTRY LIFE
MY reference to Great Tew a Week ago reminds me of how little known is its countryside and yet full .of interesting mementoes,lhardly any of which appear in guide books. It is mostly in Oxfordshire, and here the oolite limestone, on its way north-eastwArd between the Rollright Stones and Cowper's Olney, is so Squeezed in that the strata are highly varied and complex. Golden-yellow at Great Tew, the stone is dove-grey else- where and orange-tawny in the Deddington-Bloxham-Adderbury region from a strain of carbonate of iron. Up from south to north more or less within the confines of the Cherwell Valley, one place after another strikes a chord of memory or distinction. Charlton-on-Otmoor where occurred the great revolt •against its enclosure ; Yarnton where the ancient rite of parcelling out the lot-meadows lingered till an arterial road made a ghost of it ; Charlbury (this on the Eve,nlode) where the equally immemorial ceremony of beating the bounds survived up -to a few years ago ; Rousham of which more anon. Somerton Church has an extraordinary reredos of the Last Supper, the Apostles looking like jolly, yeomen at a harvest festival and yet with the sweetness of gravity in their rough country faces, and-on Troy Farm in the parish is a - mediaeval maze resembling in its configuration the mysterious one on the wild uplands of Cranbourne Chase. In gabled Deddington there are a fine plaster unicorn in the great square, a church-tower whose high pinnacles have each a weather vane, while the circuitous roads con- verge upon the geometric square. Then Aynho (in the toe of North- amptonshire) where the stone is grey again and each cottage has an apricot tree given by the Cartwrights of the manor. At Croughton is a hollow elm outside the churchyard I once measured at 16 yards of bole-circumference, and near-by Juniper is the only actual place-name mentioned by Flora Thompson in her "Candleford" trilogy.
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