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| Cross Hill Road in Adderbury |
Adderbury is a village north of Oxford, south of Banbury, which has enchanted me since I did the first of five catsits there in May last year. ‘Essence of the Cotswolds,’ said a visiting friend and yes, it is a beautiful village whose houses, some thatched, boast honey-coloured brickwork, famous in this area. Yet walking around the village, through some of those buildings you can trace the physical and even social outline of an older place.
School, Mill, Hole, Kennels
There’s the sixteenth century manor house next to the church
with its ornate chimneys, which between 1780 and 1851 was ‘Dr Woolston’s
boarding school for boys’, or The Rookery, an impressive house dating from the
fifteenth century, which contains (says this guide) a priest hole. The Old Mill
(working until the 1930s) was moved by the Duke of Argyll in the mid-eighteenth
century because it spoilt the view of his grounds. The bluntly named Dog Close
used to house the kennels for the Duke of Buccleuch’s hunting dogs. The guide
mentions reminders of the other end of the social scale – the village green had
stocks and a whipping post, as well as a cross.
Music and meetings
In Four Quartets
TS Eliot speaks of hearing music in the long ago English countryside:
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
(East Coker, ll. 23-29)
So if you do not come too close, what music and rituals can be heard and seen here? Perhaps that coming from the frieze under the eaves of Saint Mary’s church, where strange creatures play the drums, pipes and trumpet, and a mermaid seems to hold open her tail, split in two.
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| Music-making figures on St Mary's Church |
Or you might glimpse the lowered heads in a Quaker meeting – there is a Friends Meeting House, built in 1675, and Quaker gravestones nearby. The village was a home for many religious dissenters, with 27 family names recorded as Quakers. Bray Doyley, Lord of Adderbury West, went to prison for his beliefs.
To these voices I would add modern ones I have encountered –
the groups who go out in all weathers on the very friendly Adderbury Health Walks, as well as dog walkers, library staff, attendees at a concert in the church.
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| An Adderbury Health Walk. Walk leader John Bellinger is fifth from left with blue walking poles. I am on the far right at the back with a pink scarf. |
And the golden stone? Apparently this is local ironstone, not Cotswold stone, which is lighter. I wish I could read it better. Looking
more closely, you can see how various the brickwork is, from clear-cut brownish material
to different shades of yellow, brown and orange, all supplemented with the
moss, lichen, ivy, periwinkle and other plants which seem irresistibly drawn to
it.
It also has signs of older structures and patterns, such as these:
Other lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets seem appropriate here:
In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
(East Coker, ll. 1-8)
More information about the village is here.