Opposite Harrowden Hill, and to the west of Newbridge, Standlake Common may be explored by whosoever would benefit by its attractions, which, truth to tell, are very scanty. Snipe undoubtedly enjoy its boggy virtues during the winter; but the common is a marshy tract at best, and those who pass on to the village for the sake of its church of Early English architecture, and the farmhouse said to be built by John o’Gaunt and Joan his wife, do not care to linger there.
We shall pass two weir-pools, long disused, between Newbridge and Bablock Hythe, namely, Langley, or Ridge’s Weir, and Ark, or Noah’s Ark Weir. These and previous weirs referred to are of the very simplest kind, and, except in the two instances mentioned, perform their service independently of a lock. The object of this simple form of weir is to dam the river to the required height for such purposes as mill heads or navigation. The business is accomplished by the working of flood gates or paddles in grooves, and between rymers, to the sill at the bottom. In winter there may be a swift stream through the weirs, but, the weir paddles being withdrawn, there is very little fall. Shooting the weir stream—one of the adventurous feats of the upper navigation—is an amusement unknown below Oxford, and at times it is not without its risks.
STANTON HARCOURT CHURCH.
Although Bablock Hythe by road is not much more than five miles from Oxford, the circuitous voyage by Thames is twelve miles. Bablock Hythe is a well-known station on the Upper Thames, albeit it does not boast the rank of hamlet or village, and has for the accommodation of man and beast only one of the small old-fashioned inns of the humblest sort, where the rooms are low, the beams big and solid, the floors flagged, and the apartments fitted up with all manner of three-corner cupboards and antique settles. The great ferry-boat, however, gives it a decided position of importance, and it is known to Thames tourists principally as the starting-point for visiting either Cumnor or Stanton Harcourt. Most people probably go to Cumnor from Oxford, the distance being only about three miles; but many are glad to make it an excuse for halting on the somewhat monotonous ascent of the river. The reader needs scarcely to be reminded that Cumnor Place has been made immortal by the pages of Sir Walter Scott, and that the sorrows of Amy Robsart have been wept over by the English-speaking race in all parts of the world. There is an inn at Cumnor still called after that hostelry over which Giles Gosling firmly ruled, and in the church there is a monument sacred to the virtues of Tony Fire-the-fagot and his family, who are thus handed down to posterity in a far different character from that suggested by Sir Walter as pertaining to the tool of the villain Varney. Cumnor is on the Berkshire side, and on the Oxford side is Stanton Harcourt, visited for the sake of the remains of its ancient mansion, and its fine church. Visitors, probably, would not make the journey exclusively in the interests of either one or the other, nor of the two large upright stones called the Devil’s Quoits, which one historian conjectures were erected to commemorate the battle fought in 614 between the Saxons and the Britons.
EYNSHAM WEIR.
The real attraction of Stanton Harcourt is historical, and historical in several degrees. It was one of the vast estates which fell as loot to the half-brother of William the Conqueror, and was evidently a considerable possession. For more than 600 years the manor continued in the Harcourt family. Little is left of the grand mansion in which the lords of Stanton Harcourt dwelt. The Harcourt family gave it up as a place of residence towards the close of the seventeenth century, and it fell forthwith to decay. With the exception of the porter’s lodge, the arms on each side of the gate, showing that it was erected by Sir Simon Harcourt, who died in 1547, and some upper rooms in the small remaining part of the house adjoining the kitchen, are all that remain. But there is a more recent historical interest attaching to Stanton Harcourt; in a habitable suite of rooms in the deserted mansion Pope passed the greater part of two summers, and to this day the principal apartment bears the name of Pope’s study. The little man required quiet and retirement during his translation of the Fifth Book of Homer, and upon one of the panes of glass he wrote, in the year 1718, “Alexander Pope finished here the fifth volume of Homer.” The Harcourts, however, removed this pane to Nuneham Courtney, where it is preserved—a piece of red stained glass, six inches by two. The old Stanton Harcourt kitchen, converted to modern uses, was always a curiosity, and Dr. Plott, the Oxford historian, says of it, “It is so strangely unusual that, by way of riddle, one may truly call it either a kitchen within a chimney or a kitchen without one, for below it is nothing but a large square, and octangular above, ascending like a tower, the fires being made against the walls, and the smoke climbing up them without any tunnels or disturbance to the cooks, which, being stopped by a large conical roof at the top, goes out at loopholes on every side, according as how the wind sets, the loopholes at the side next the wind being shut by folding doors, and the adverse side open.”