I had the day off yesterday, and the weather forecast was good, so we took the opportunity to finish the Oxfordshire Way, returning via Lewknor and the Ridgeway to follow the trail up into the Chilterns at Christmas Common and then through wooded hills to descend to the Thames at Henley, twelve and a half miles in total.



It was a lovely day, sunny but not as hot as it was when we walked the last stage, and this is a really delightful stretch of path. A lot of it runs through beechwoods, interspersed with fields and occasional flint-and-brick villages. It may not have been as long as some of the sections we've done, but it was definitely the hilliest section, with three major climbs and corresponding descents, and quite steep in places. We stopped for lunch by the preetty little flint church at Pishill (pronounced, I gather, Pies'll), because if there's one thing that I've learnt from all this walking is that if you're in England and want a bench to eat your sandwiches on you're almost certain to find one in a churchyard. Pishill Church was particularly well-equipped, possessing not only a choice of benches but a kettle, mugs and tea and coffee left in the porch for the benefit of thirsty walkers, along with rather good flapjack in return for a suggested donation of 50p per piece. (I'd say "most C of E thing ever", except that on Sunday we went to see the helter-skelter in Norwich Cathedral.) After Pishill, we climbed the hill at Maidensgrove and then descended via the Warburg Nature Reserve to a stretch of road-walking before a final climb from Middle Assendon to cross Henley Park and head down to the town and river.

The end of the Oxfordshire Way isn't commemorated with a plaque or obelisk as better-known trails are; I think the last (or first, depending on your direction) sign is the one pointing off a road on the outskirts of Henley along the path to Henley Park. I don't think it's ever going to be a destination walk, and I probably wouldn't revisit the middle sections, but it's been lovely getting to know Oxfordshire a bit better and the first and last couple of sections were delightful. I wouldn't redo yesterday's walk as a linear walk, but that was mainly because of the awkwardness of the transport links that way; having to get the bus into Oxford and then all the way out again via Headington to Lewknor meant that it took us an hour and a half to get to the start, and the same again to get back via the two changes needed to get from Henley to Oxford by train. I would absolutely do a circular walk on the same paths, though, and as our book of adventurous walks includes one which starts and finishes in Christmas Common and returns via the Oxfordshire Way from Maidensgrove via Pishill, I suspect we definitely will.

I had the day off work yesterday, and as it was significantly cooler than it had been for the rest of the week (though still quite warm) we decided to tackle the next stage of the Oxfordshire Way, retracing our steps to Islip and then following the Way through Beckley and Waterperry to Tiddington, which straddles the Oxford-Thame-Aylesbury Road and is served by the 280 Oxford-Aylesbury bus which we could catch back to Oxford.



This and the Kirtlington-Islip section are probably the least interesting bits of the Oxfordshire Way, mostly running across the flattish farmland of the floodplains of the northern Thames tributaries in between the interesting hilly bits of the Cotswolds and Chilterns. The most interesting bit of yesterday's walk was probably the bit around Beckley, where the path crosses the northern end of the low ridge of hills to the east of Oxford (Forest Hill, Shotover, Garsington Hill, Cuddesdon Hill, part of the same lowish ridge that Cumnor Hill, Boar's Hill and Wytham Hill to the west belong to, as well as Folly Hill in Faringdon and Brill just over the Buckinghamshire border; you can see it quite clearly on this topographic map if that's the sort of thing that interests you) with lovely views from either side of the ridge; before that we skirted the Otmoor RSPB reserve, where we didn't see any birds but did see absolute clouds of meadow brown butterflies. After descending the hill from Beckley the rest of the walk was almost entirely flat fields; pleasant enough, but a little dull.

As there wasn't a convenient village to stop in for lunch on this leg of the walk (Beckley was a bit too close to the start, and then we didn't go through any settlements at all until we got to Waterperry, only a couple of miles from the end) we paused to eat our sandwiches in a small wood near Horton-cum-Studley where we spotted three fallow deer grazing on the path. Shortly after this we met a man walking the other way who warned us that he had been chased by bullocks in a field about half an hour away, and showed us the place on the map. I was glad we were forewarned; it turned out that there was quite a large herd of bullocks in a very long (about a mile and a half) narrow field running all the way round the southeastern corner of a wood, and although to start with there was a reasonable path just inside the fringe of the wood, screened by trees but outside the barbed-wire fence enclosing the wood proper, this petered out once the path turned east along the bottom of the wood, at about the same point as the cows spotted us and started running towards us in a definitely intimidating manner, so we decided that the only thing for it was to wriggle under the barbed wire and pick our way along inside the wood until we reached the end of the field; this was definitely the better option, but much slower going than walking along a good path, which is probably why the 16.5 miles took us about an hour longer than we expected. (That also wasn't helped by being held up at one point, shortly after we'd finally finished circumventing the field with the cows, by three medium-large dogs which bounded out of the garden of a house adjacent to the park to bark at us until their owner finally appeared to call them away, grumbling that she couldn't get there any faster and they wouldn't have hurt us anyway. It was not a good day for intimidating animals.)

We certainly won't be doing that bit of the Oxfordshire Way again, in any case; hopefully the next section (which will just get us to the edge of the Chilterns, as far as the intersection with the Ridgeway which we'll need to follow back to Lewknor to catch a bus home) will be better.

We're off to Scotland again at the end of August, heading back to Fort William to pick up where we left off at the end of the West Highland Way and walk the Great Glen Way to Inverness. In preparation for this (and also because we enjoy it anyway) we've been upping our walking distances, and a few weeks ago we also started talking about the possibility of doing a two-day walk with a night in a B&B to help us get back into the habit of doing long walks on consecutive days. At first the plan was to do a two-day walk, getting the train to Moreton-in-Marsh and walking to Charlbury via an overnight stop in Bourton-on-the-Water, but then we looked more closely at the map and measured distances with a bit of string and realised that it would be perfectly possible to walk home from Charlbury in a day via the Oxfordshire Way and the Oxford Canal towpath, so we extended it to a three-day walk. Unlike our normal multi-day walks, for this one we carried everything with us, but it's not as if three days of walking in high summer require that much in the way of luggage (pyjamas, two spare tops, two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, deodorant, toothbrush) and although I'm still wondering if my new 30l daypack is slightly too big for a day's walking it was the perfect size for a three-day walk, with enough space to add in my walking sandals so I didn't have to spend the evenings in boots.

( Day 1: Moreton-in-Marsh to Bourton-on-the-Water via Stow-on-the-Wold )

( Day 2: Bourton-on-the-Water to Charlbury )

( Day 3: Charlbury to Kidlington )

Generally, this was a really nice walk along well-maintained and well-signposted paths. It was a great way to relax and unwind after another busy term at work, and it was fun to go away with such minimal luggage and not have to make any decisions at all about what to wear. It also demonstrated that, lovely as Scotland is, it's not always necessary to travel a long way to find adventure or get away from things; Moreton-in-Marsh is only a couple of hours away by public transport, even with the rail replacement bus, and only 20 miles from us by road, and yet we managed a fabulous three days of meandering gently back home and might have been hundreds of miles away for all the thought we gave to home, work and normal life.