The best walks and hikes around Cottisford

A beautiful park with an obelisk as the centrefold, built in 2012 to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

If you know the English novelist Flora Thompson, you may enjoy this stop at her childhood home.

Picturesque gravel road from Cottisford, links well with routes into Tusmore or on towards Hethe

Flora Thompson (née Timms) (1876 – 1947) was a self-taught English novelist, who wrote about the decay of Victorian agrarian England. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy "Lark Rise to Candleford". "Laura's parents ... thought the house was well worth the rent, for it was two small thatched cottages made into one, with two bedrooms and a good garden. Of course, as they said, it had not the conveniences of a town house. Until they themselves had bought an oven grate and put it in the second cottage downstairs room, known as 'the wash-house', there was nowhere to bake the Sunday joint, and it was tiresome to have to draw water up from a well and irritating in wet weather to have to walk under an umbrella half way down the garden to the earth closet. But the cottage living-room was a pleasant place, with its well-polished furniture, shelves of bright crockery, and red-and-black rugs laid down to 'take the tread' on the raddled tile floor. In summer the window stood permanently open and hollyhocks and other tall flowers would push their way in and mingle with the geraniums and fuchsias on the window-sill. This room was the children's nursery ... [and ] had one advantage over most nurseries. The door opened straight out on to the garden path and in fine weather the children were allowed to run in and out as they would. Even when it rained and a board was slipped, country fashion, into grooves in the doorposts to keep them in, they could still lean out over it and feel the rain splash on their hands and see the birds flicking their wings in the puddles and smell the flowers and wet earth while they sang: 'Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day.'" From Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford"

This beautiful ancient lime tree has a girth of 8.02m at a height of 1.10m, suggesting an advanced age of around 300 years. Lime trees are important trees for beekeepers with their fragrant and nectar-producing flowers.

Flora Thompson (5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford. Verse Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921) Novels Lark Rise (1939) Over to Candleford (1941) Candleford Green (1943) Lark Rise to Candleford (1945, the above three novels published as a trilogy) Still Glides the Stream (1948, published posthumously) Heatherley (1944, published posthumously first in A Country Calendar 1979 along with some Peverel Papers and some poems; then as a single volume in 1998) Gates of Eden (serialised in The Peverel Monthly edited by Thompson in the late 1920s but never published as a separate volume) Dashpers (unfinished, unpublished novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Thompson

Tusmore House in Oxfordshire, built for Wafic Said, the Syrian-born millionaire, has been declared the best new building in the classical tradition at the annual Georgian Group awards. The house is on the scale of the great houses of the 18th century. Its portico of solid stone rivals that of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. The quality of the scagliola columns in the central rotunda has been compared with the finest craftsmanship of the imperial palaces of St Petersburg. The owner and architects refused to be drawn on costs but the house has been valued at £35 million. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1475634/The-English-country-house-rises-once-more.html

IT IS the kind of gesture to make even a monarch blush. One of Britain’s richest and most controversial businessmen has built a lavish monument to the Queen in his back garden. Wafic Said, the Syrian-born billionaire, has erected a 92ft stone obelisk in the grounds of his 3,000-acre Oxfordshire country estate, Tusmore Park, and dedicated it to the Queen’s diamond jubilee. The monument, which took two years to complete and weighs 300 tons, is the biggest obelisk to be built in Britain since the 18th century. It is topped with a 5ft metal cap covered in gold that catches the sun’s rays and the “clouds scudding by”, according to its architect Andrew Lockwood, a partner at Whitfield Lockwood Architects, Co Durham. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tycoons-300-ton-homage-to-queen-8kkpklnvnvz