Walking: Stadhampton, Little Milton, Cuddesdon, Garsington, Toot Baldon and Chiselhampton

The weather looked a bit iffy today, but after a week of wet weather when I hadn't managed to spend nearly enough time outside I didn't want to miss the chance for a walk, so we packed our waterproofs picked another walk from the book of "adventurous" walks, a 12.5-mile circuit of the villages to the south-east of Oxford on either side of the River Thame.



We didn't get off to the best of starts; I am still quite scared of my new car and find driving it quite stressful, and getting to Stadhampton involves negotiating the Cowley junction of the Oxford ring road which I hate anyway. And then when we got to Stadhampton the parking by the village green which the book recommended had a sign saying it was only for the church and village hall events (from the expressions of the kind people who drove up behind us just after we'd parked outside their house and said it was fine, we didn't need to move, when we mentioned it, I assume a tediously over-zealous parish council getting on their high horse about it). I was also repeatedly annoyed by the chest strap of my new Decathlon backpack popping off the piping it slides up and down several times, and got grumpier and grumpier as it became clear that the problem really was that the bag is not designed for people with busts, as the only way to get the strap to cross above my bust involves positioning it right at the top of the piping, where it pops off as there's a bit of fabric without the cord inside to facilitate removing the strap if needed. It settled down in the end, and before I use it again I might try sewing some seed beads or something at the top of the cord to stop the strap sliding up any higher, but it made me very cross at the time.

However,in the end we only got seriously rained on once, for about ten minutes, and other than that it was dry and even occasionally sunny. The walk climbed from the low-lying Thame Valley onto the southern slopes of the limstone outcrop which forms Shotover and Headington Hills, with broad views south to the Chiltern escarpment and less inspiring views north-west to Oxford, which from this aspect is rather less dreaming spires and more Midlands industrial town, with the dominant features being the BMW plant and the tower blocks and housing of Blackbird Leys. We saw the usual red kites and skylarks, several rabbits as we came down the hill from Garsington, and two roe deer bounding across a field just in front of us between Garsington and Toot Baldon, and eventually the walking worked its magic and I began to feel happier and calmer.

It's not a walk I'd recommend, or one we'll be doing again, though; we encountered far too many fields where the crops had been planted with complete disregard for the paths, which combined with some irritatingly vague directions in the book made it hard to navigate and sometimes hard to get through even when we had worked out where the path was. In one case, it looked for a moment as though we would need to cross a paddock of very frisky young cattle, though fortunately it turned out that we just needed to cross the next-door paddock of slightly less frisky horses; further on, we did have to cross a field of cows with calves which I found an utterly terrifying experience. There were also a lot of very badly maintained stiles. And then we got to a point where we absolutely couldn't see where the path we were meant to be on might be, and after consulting the map decided we must have turned too early, retracted our steps to the path we'd turned off (adding another mile or so to the walk) and carried on, only to find that there wasn't another turning and that must have been the right way after all, but by this point the only sensible thing to do (for some values of sensible) was to walk the mile and a half to Chiselhampton along a fairly busy B-road. This may well have actually counted as adventurous, but if so, it's not the kind of adventure we were thinking of!