Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds

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By H. A. Evans

OXFORD AND THE COTSWOLDS was first published as part of the Highways and Byways series in 1905. Herbert Arthur Evans, a Balliol man, researched the book by travelling the dusty roads on his bicycle dropping into country inns for sustenance and accommodation. Evans deplored the new-fangled ‘globe-scouring’ motorist and did his best to warn motor cars away altogether by describing steep gradients that would try their engines severely. His gentle progress through the countryside was interrupted by even the sound of tractors in the fields. The gentry still drove into the towns in their horse-drawn carriages throwing up dust in summer and mud in winter.

Conversations overheard in Cotswold pubs were sometimes incomprehensible rustic not yet having undergone the gradual movements towards standardization of accent that the advent of radio and television would initiate and which, perhaps, will eventually be complete. Evan’s Oxford was solely a seat of learning, the industrial side of the city not as yet being dreamed of. The movement of labour from the land to industry depleted the Cotswold countryside and changed the face of Oxford. The pleasure of reading this book today is not so much to deplore the changes that ninety years have wrought, so much which was inevitable, but to celebrate a less complicated style of life in that long Edwardian afternoon when the Great War and its horrific carnage was several years away and the world-shaking war of 1939-1945 was unimaginable.

After Evan’s death his book was issued in a revised edition in 1938 by which time great changes had already occurred. This reprint is taken from the original edition of 1905 exhibiting Oxford and the Cotswolds as the author new it at the turn of the century. As Evan’s wrote in his preface, ‘The district explored is that which lies between the Cherwell on the east, and the fringe of the Cotswolds on the west – in other words, the northern half of the basin of the upper Thames’, using Oxford as the starting point, of course.

THE LINE DRAWINGS which enhance this book are the work of Frederick L. Griggs RA (1876-1938) one of the finest of architectural illustrators. Griggs lived at Chipping Campden for a large part of his life.

ISBN 0 9518589 6 3