Oxford

Dear Alex,

I am a regular reader of your blog, “Escaping Oxford”. Each week, on Sunday, though disappointed by your irregular publishing time, I await your latest post eagerly. I then spend the rest of the week planning, so that the following Saturday I can repeat your voyage. By this, I hope to share in your wonderful experiences, and even improve upon them.

I am therefore disgusted to see that you plan, this week, to write about Oxford itself. This entirely undermines the premise, and title, of your project. Moreover, I now have nothing to spend my week planning, and must instead complete the report that my supervisor has asked for.

Please cancel my subscription.

Yours,

Iain Ventid
Magdalene College

Hi Iain! I’m glad to see you enjoy my blog. I am mildly concerned that your activities seem perilously close to stalking, but I’ll let that slide as you seem committed to ceasing and desisting.

However, I think it’s worth bearing in mind that not all students have the budget to travel every Saturday—indeed, I don’t, which is why several of my posts have been “archive” journeys from before I started this blog, or places I’ve been going anyway, or even just cop-out posts where I didn’t go anywhere. So I thought it was worth taking a week to explain the ways you could escape Oxford—or, at least, the Oxford life—without going anywhere at all. Here, therefore, are some of my favourite places to get away from it all: all free or cheap, and all within a short walk of the centre of town.

Date of trip: n/a
Journey time: approx. 0 minutes
Fare: £0 (Off-Peak, with 16–25 Railcard)

Botanical Gardens

I’m going to start with the obvious. Well, it would be the obvious, except for the fact that I went for the first time yesterday. To be honest, I’d seen how small it was, especially compared to the gardens in Cambridge and London, and couldn’t see that I was missing much—though as I passed six years in Oxford without having been, I knew I had to go soon. Yesterday I finally managed it.

It’s definitely worth a visit (and would be even if it weren’t free to Bod card holders).  The space is used well, so you have beds packed with plants with medicinal properties (explained on little signs), a bed of important food crops and other “plants that changed the world”, and so on.  Plus a Civil War yew tree.  And it’s even worth a visit on a cold day like yesterday, because there are also plenty of glasshouses to visit (I find carnivorous plants weirdly interesting).  A very cute baby pineapple was there too (I didn’t realise they grew that way).

Port Meadow

I realise, that, so far, this post isn’t exactly groundbreaking, so I’m not going to spend long on this section.  I thought I’d mention it, though, because, like with the gardens, it took me a long time to go there.  Seeing cows and so on so near to a city centre is weird, but a perfect way to feel like you’ve left academia behind.  Just make sure you take a phone with plenty of charge, and turn back if the battery dies; definitely don’t plough further in, and get lost in a nature reserve with the light steadily failing, and by way of the resultant panic fail to appreciate the cute deer roaming around.  (Hypothetical scenario, of course.)

Paths by the Cherwell

This is a bit more hidden away.  Mesopotamia is accessed via the Marston Cyclepath (there’s a map here showing where it starts) and runs between two branches of the Cherwell—hence the name, which means “between the rivers”.  It’s really peaceful, mainly because most of the tourists visiting the Parks don’t find it.  It also gives you a great view of a field with Narnia-like lampposts through it.

Going the other way, if you walk through the Parks along the river to the high footbridge, and then cross it, you can immediately turn left and walk along the other side.  This area is beautiful, and occasionally, in spring, home to cute ducklings; wear sensible shoes, though, as it can get quite muddy.  The path takes you up to another high footbridge, this one across to Wolfson (which you can walk through the grounds of, to the left, to get back to Banbury Road).  I’ve never done it, but I think you can carry on through Wolfson’s nature reserve as far as the Victoria Arms, favoured haunt of northern punters.

Oxford Canal

The canal is another rather pretty waterside walk, and again you don’t feel like you’re in the city any more.  There are a few access points: from Hythe Bridge Street in the city centre; from the north end of the appropriately named Canal Street, deep in Jericho; from higher up in Jericho, on Walton Well Road and Aristotle Lane.  At the northern end the view is mostly of houses that back onto the river, alarmingly many of which have private skiffs to take out onto the water.  Further down you see the back of Lucy’s Eagle Ironworks, which closed in 2005 and was, predictably, converted to flats.  Right at the end near the city centre, past the junction for boats to continue their journey past Oxford via the Thames, the remaining stub of the canal is mooring for houseboats, with the occasional cat.

Modern Art Oxford

I wanted to include somewhere indoors, because the British weather is often foul enough that none of the places above is suitable for a visit.  I considered Floor 3M at the Ashmolean, which is pleasantly tucked away and usually quiet, but I’ve mentioned that before, and, given that the Ashmolean is owned and run by the university, it felt like a little too much of a cheat to count it as an escape from Oxford.  Likewise, the Norrington Room at Blackwell’s, while an unexpected delight, is packed with academic texts, and so, depending on your subject, is possibly not quite the place to get away from it all.

Short of ideas, I went with one of my regular readers (not Iain) to Modern Art Oxford today, to see what that was like.  Answer: alright.  I’d say more about the exhibition, but by the time you read this it will probably have closed, given that today was the last day.  But worth a trip if you want somewhere to hide away inside for a bit.  The art wasn’t too modern, so to speak.

And there you go, Iain; I hope I haven’t disappointed you too much with today’s post.  If not, next week I’ll talk about London.  Hope that’s far enough away for you.  And also far enough away from me.