Exploring rights of way in Oxford
As part of the Think Human Festival at Oxford Brookes, the team organised a guided walk from Headington Campus to Parson's Pleasure. This was followed by a panel chaired by Professor Glen O’Hara with panellists Dr Tom Breen (Oxford Brookes University), Jack Cornish (Ramblers), Jayne Gray (Oxfordshire County Council), Dr Rose O'Neill (Campaign for National Parks), and Dr Jackie Parsonage-Harrison (Oxford Brookes University).
The short film-poem below gives a flavour of the walk, with words and images responding to the route.
The Walk
Our walk was led by Mark Davies (Oxford Local Historian) and began at Oxford Brookes Headington Campus, down Cuckoo Lane, an ancient footpath which marked the boundary between the parishes of St Clement’s and Headington. We continued past the University of Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and on to King’s Mill Lane. Antiquarian Anthony Wood suggested the Mill here had roots in the Saxon period.
A snippet of our walk along Mesopotamia.
As we crossed onto Mesopotamia, we moved beyond the bounds of official public footpaths and onto a permissive path as the surrounding land is owned by Oxford Colleges. The Mesopotamia Walk, so named from the Greek for ‘between two rivers’, takes you between two branches of the River Cherwell. This historically formed the boundary of Oxford and Headington from at least the eighteenth century, formalised as the municipal boundary in 1832.
We continued to Parson’s Pleasure, known as Patten’s Pleasure in the seventeenth century. Until 1991 this was an area for nude male bathing and still is subject to much folklore. We climbed back up to Oxford Brookes, musing on the things we had learnt.
Speaking to people who came on the walk, some of whom were keen and experienced walkers who had completed a number of national trails, we were struck by the deep affection and connection they held for walking the paths through this area of Oxford. The meaning that rights of way hold for people is something that our qualitative research will explore; how paths contribute to a sense of belonging and place attachment (both locally and nationally) are important aspects of this.
The Panel
After the walk, we returned to the Oxford Brookes University Campus to recharge with sandwiches, tea and coffee, before the panel with a range of experts. The discussion was lively and wide-ranging, topics included:
How urban paths like alleyways and tenfoots tend to be recorded on the List of Streets rather than the Definitive Map - and the implications for protecting these rights of way.
The mental health and wellbeing benefits of spending time in the outdoors for adolescents, and the current level of young people’s experiential engagement with nature.
Issues of power and the importance of remembering that the history of the rights of way movement is a key part of working class history.
We also encouraged people to share their experiences and insights from the walk and discussion on social media, you can read a Wakelet summary of these online discussions here.
If you’re interested in exploring our walk for yourself, some of the places we visited can be found here.