OXFORD TO ABINGDON.
A little hill at Iffley lifts up the rusty-grey rectory and church. The church is, for its size, made in an absurd number of styles, beginning with Late Norman. The heavy arches inside are carved round with sunflowers, looking like an ancient imitation of modern work. Outside, there is the strangest confusion of carvings; a centaur strayed from Phigaleia, and other pagan images among the Christian symbols. The Gods in Exile have visited Iffley too. On the south side a great yew has been building all through the Transition and the Perpendicular and the Tractarian times, and the people who Decorated, and the people who Late Middle Pointed, and the rest make the ground quite uneven round its roots. An undated villager, who styles himself Archdeacon of Iffley, and has a venerable humour, comes among the graves for company.
Behind the hill, and a little beyond Iffley, lies Littlemore. Here is the little church that Newman built, and came to from St. Mary’s for the last two years of the Via Media. Near it is the range of low buildings that people called a monastery, where Mark Pattison and others came to be with Newman, and where, on October 8th, 1845, Newman was received into the “One Fold of Christ” by Father Dominic the Passionist, the good father making holy puns upon the name of the place. Now The College, as the building is called in the village, is given as almshouses to the poor. The largest room is a public library. In the kitchen lives an old woman who served the Newmans in her youth. Her husband, an old toy peasant, with smock-frock and silver hair, and a fine rheumatism that I am sure his country gladly supports, sits by. She stands up and remembers Newman. He lived there with his pupils “before he became a Pope. The Pope of Rome, that’s the real Pope, over-persuaded him, and he went away and never came back again. She did hear that the Church of England gave him some punishment for leaving, but didn’t rightly know. And the clerk’s wife had been to see him, and found him in a bare room with no carpet on the bricks, like any poor person, and had said that it was to be humble and like his Master that he did it all.”
Meanwhile on the river we have to pass some ornate sewage works, and the wanton embankment of a railway, that here crosses to Littlemore. Below lies the Rose Isle, with its “Swan Inn,” and on the right the heights come nearer with the little village of Kennington. A beautiful tree-planted road runs along the top to Radley, with its school in the old park of the Bowyers’ house, and against the tall trees is a little grey church and thatched cottages, where women come out and sit with their sewing machines on the summer evenings. From this the road goes on through a corn country to Abingdon.
Next on the river comes Sandford Mill, with a leaning chimney, that has all the interest and all the beauty of the leaning tower of Pisa. Sandford Church lies away from the river, nearer the Nuneham Road. The porch proclaims, “Condidit me domina Eliz. Isham. Anno gratiæ 1652,” and adds—
“Thanks to thy charitie, religiose dame,
Which found me old, and made me new againe.”
It is proper, at the same time, to speak strongly of the taste which found the church Norman, and made it something very new indeed. But it is worth while going in to see the curious carving in the chancel of the Assumption of the Virgin.