It has recently been brought to my attention that I led you astray in my last blog, promising to talk about one of England’s grandest country houses and then failing to deliver. So, to right this unforgiveable wrong, I will now revisit my day trip to Blenheim Palace from last week. Omitting Blenheim was intentional, it was just shoddy editing on my part. The reason that I left it out of my last blog was that I felt that it warranted its own separate discussion, mostly because I knew the discussion would turn into another landscape-architecture fuelled rant. So buckle up.

To be clear, I have no issues with the palace itself. It is truly spectacular; a grandiose statement in stone that is a testament to its supremely talented creators. Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh are two of the household names in British architecture, and at Blenheim it is easy to see why. The palace is an English Baroque version of Versailles, more modest in detail – it lacks Versailles flair for gold, bright colours and other bells and whistles – but just as impressive in scale. It is strongly symmetrical around a great courtyard, adorned with classical sculpture and ornaments, and demonstrates an almost manic obsession with proportionality. All that having been said, Blenheim confirmed my personal preference for domestic architecture – for buildings that look as though they’re meant to be lived-in and loved. I can appreciate the creativity and genius behind a place like Blenheim, but it is more of a monument than a home, and when it comes to buildings, I prefer something more “human” and welcoming. This preference holds true for other English buildings as well. I generally prefer the architecture of the historic old streets, shops, hotels and markets of cities than the monumental tourist buildings. I greatly prefer Covent Garden Market over Buckingham Palace for example. I also prefer the thatch roofed cottages of the Cotswold villages to the colleges of Oxford. Maybe it’s the country kid in me coming out, but that’s just my opinion of architecture.

Getting back on track, my real issue with Blenheim, is with its grounds and parkland (shocking as that may sound). The landscape was designed by the infamous Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown who we learned so much about in our first year “History of Cultural Form” class. Capability Brown was a master of the English “picturesque” style of landscape gardening. Basically he was an artist, carefully composing a landscape through the artful placement of trees, sculptures, ponds etc. Admittedly, the landscape at Blenheim (which consists of a man-made lake and rolling expanses of trees and lawns) is very artistically composed, but I think that’s the problem. It looks too designed, and it is made to look too static. It is as if the landscape is meant to be only viewed from a distance. To be fair, at least they let you walk on the grass, but it feels too structured and formal to be enjoyed. I think the main issue is that there is nothing to animate the landscape. Wild places are animated by wildlife and diverse varieties of plants (a National Park is exceptionally dynamic because it is home to so many creatures and plants), urban places on the other hand are human habitats and therefore animated by people (streets and plazas are not alive in a biological sense, but people occupy them and give them a dynamic, living quality). Blenheim, seems to be caught in no-man’s-land. The interests of wildlife are cast aside in the interests of artistry, so that dynamic potential is lost, and the people who could animate the landscape feel (or at least I felt) discouraged to interact with it. In Central Park (a park designed in the same “picturesque” style) I would feel no trepidation about playing frisbee on the grass or walking around barefoot. I can never picture anyone doing that at Blenheim. It’s as if the grounds have been made to be a museum, something from the past, something carefully preserved, and something to be seen and not touched. I think that’s appropriate for the building, but not for the outdoors.

But enough of this critical ranting and raving, on to something that I genuinely and totally enjoyed from this week. I’m sure there are more exciting, adrenaline-pumping things that I could have done on a beautiful sunny day than wandering through farmer’s fields in Gloucestershire, but on Monday I couldn’t think of any, so that’s precisely where I found myself. Armed with my trust Ordnance Survey map of the Cotswolds I set off in the morning for the train station, determined to find somewhere to explore. I took a half-hour train ride to Moreton-in-Marsh (another one of those quaint little fairy-tale village names), and got my bearings. I decided to follow the ‘Monarch’s Way’ footpath towards Stow-on-the-Wold (I’m not making these names up I swear), but first I dawdled around Moreton. It is a very pretty little old market town, featuring numerous buildings that fit my idea of nice, “lived-in and loved” architecture. The contents of the buildings are mostly boutique art galleries, antique shops and tea rooms. Very few buildings in the town centre seemed to fulfill any sort of necessity but I thankfully found the lone grocery store and bought some things for lunch. If you were quite a few years older than I am (and it seemed like everyone in town was), you could easily have spent the whole day ambling through the galleries and ogling the antiquities, but after half an hour of wandering I had had my fill and I headed for the fields.

In many ways this picture succinctly sums up Moreton-in-Marsh

As I alluded to before, I am realizing more and more by the day how much of a country kid I really am. I love cities, and visiting London is always a thrill, but I have accepted the fact that I desperately need wide open spaces to explore. Wide open spaces that are far away from metropolises like London, and that preferably have some sheep who I can chat with. And so as I wandered along the fields of Moreton on a gloriously sunny day, shouting greetings to confused looking sheep, I found myself feeling wholly refreshed and smiling like a fool once again. 

The tire swing only added to my foolishness

My new friends

I may have said this already, but England really has a good thing going with their extensive networks of public footpaths. It is a totally foreign concept to Canadians. We fence off our land, slap up some “No Trespassing” signs and take great offense to ramblers venturing on to “our” land. On my walk, the public footpaths often lead quite directly through the very middle of a farmer’s pasture (sometimes there was an alternate path to take if the cows were out grazing), and the walkers don’t upset the farmers as long as they keep their garbage off the fields and close the gates behind them. That’s all they ask. It’s a beautiful relationship, fostering a shared sense of ownership and responsibility for the land you’re walking on. The farmer may have the deed to the land, but if feels like common property, like it’s not his/her field but our field. Everyone has an interest in how it is maintained and cared for: the farmer wants a productive pasture, and the walkers want a nice path.

My walk took me through a series of fields, over a series of stiles and through a series of gates. I should mention that no two gates had the same locking mechanism. Some of them were either broken, or a little too idiot proof, I can’t decide which. At a couple of instances, thoroughly befuddled, I discreetly looked to ensure nobody was watching before quickly and gracefully scrambling over the gate, composing myself and forging ahead. In my own special way, I had outsmarted the pugnacious little gate latch. A great victory for humanity indeed. Eventually I reached the village of Lonborough. By Cotswold standards it is nothing to write home about (even though that’s kind of what I’m doing now), but it had endearing qualities, among which were a number of pretty little stone cottages, with names to match. Names like “Honeysuckle Cottage” or “Cutie Pie Place” or “Snugglemuffin’s Nest”. Along those lines.

Longborough

The stiles were straightforward. No latches or anything

I passed through Longborough and made my way uphill. We haven’t had rain for what feels like eons, yet somehow there was an abundance of mud on the narrow slope up the hill. My boots and pants look as if I fought a long and difficult battle with the mud (which I sort of did), and in hindsight I must have been a bit of a sight walking back home through Oxford, but never mind. I made it to the top of the hill and found a fence to sit on next to a woodland that Google Maps tells me is called “Humblebee Coppice” (not made up), and had my lunch overlooking the town below. After I felt sufficiently nourished and rested, I made my way further along the trail towards Stow. I crested another couple of hills, before descending again into the village of Broadwell. From there it was a steep uphill trek along a narrow roadway (thankfully the only road I encountered on my journey) before finally reaching my destination of Stow-on-the-Wold.

My lunch picnic view

Stow is sickeningly pretty. For the contemporary, fast-paced Londoner I imagine the village is repulsive and hideously out of touch with modern reality. If you ask me, it’s their loss, and they are probably not missed by the small-town folk and tourists I found there. Like Moreton, Stow is an old market town with some beautiful stone buildings and boutique shops. There are little alleyways full of hidden gems (one such gem was a wonderfully claustrophobic bookstore which was home to a dog with a penchant for heavy snoring) and a church that is over 1,000 years old. I was quite fond of it, and it was well worth the 2.5 hour, 10km walk. I caught a bus back to Moreton, and slowly picked my way through town back to the train station, and returned to the bustle of Oxford. There is much to be said for cities, but if you ask me, there is more to be said for the countryside and the respite it offers.

I recently bought the collection of major works by English poet William Wordsworth in anticipation of my Lake District escapades, and one of his quotes perfectly sums up how I feel about the countryside.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted
By the hurrying world and droop
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign is solitude