Highs and Lows of Cherwell

The text and routes in these mapping apps are based on content in my blog where you can find the updated versions of the routes and notes on the landscape, history and things to watch out for. Link www.pootler.co.uk.

This is a varied but undemanding ride around the fringes of the Cotswolds in Northern Oxfordshire. It leaves Bicester using the cycle path to the South of the A41 then crosses that road to follow the Roman ‘Akeman Street’ to its conclusion. The route then heads north for 10 miles across higher ground to cross the River Cherwell at Somerton. You then climb around 200 ft, into the Eastern foothills of the Cotswolds and follow a scenic ridge road for a few miles before turning south towards Islip and the flat and empty marshland of Otmoor.  Outside of Bicester, the ride uses minor and usually well-maintained roads. There are no off road sections. The living is easy, the fish are jumping etc.

Zooming In

Highlights are:

Laughing at the ersatz ‘consumer paradise’ of Bicester Shopping Village.

Enjoying the genuine character of the Cotswold stone villages, Lower Heyford, Somerton, Dun's Tew, Islip and Chalton

The views from the ridges above and beyond the Cherwell Valley

Islip, Birthplace of Edward The Confessor

The rather strange flat, empty, often windy and once fought over drained marshland of Otmoor

The usual melange of oddities.

On the blog, there are detailed notes on waypoints and things to see. If your mapping app has not imported these, use this link to go directly to the blog post of the route. I hope these will be more entertaining than the links to dry Wikipedia articles dredged up as POI’s by the mapping apps’ software robots. This cannot give you the exact location for each waypoint but it many cases you won’t need it and at least the information will be up to date!

Link : Pootler Route

Zooming Out

As you might expect, this area is mostly an extension of the limestone geology of the Cotswolds foothills. All of these limestones are rich in fossils. Keep an eye out! As usual there is a lot of clay, but equally much variety. In places you find ‘cornbrash’ or ‘stonebrash’, a dry rubble that wheat seems to like.

Under the mud in Otmoor is ‘blue shale’ mudstone (older mud!), another fine grained variety of sedimentary rock. The villages sit on islands of gravel in what used to be extensive marshes.

stern Oxfordshire is a wealthy area and the attractive villages hereabouts owe more to a little ‘re-imagining’ and careful maintenance than benign neglect. The farmers seem to be growing winter wheat, barley and oilseed with a lot of land left fallow and fewer sheep and cattle. It wasn't always like that. Farming on the heavy and badly drained soils of the clay vale in particular could be difficult although both pastoral and arable farming are possible. Notwithstanding, even the higher ground has been shaped by the enclosures. The exceptions are mainly the Parklands associated with the grand estates and the smallholdings flanking the road across Otmoor.

There are few commons or waste lands. The Churches and Manors around here are often have longer histories but the latter have often been substantially modified, usually by the obscenely rich, famous or notorious. The Waypoint notes cover the most egregious examples.

On the blog you will also find posts on the rich and complicated human and topographical history of the area as a whole, ranging from the early occupation, the changing agricultural landscape, the geomorphology of the chalk country, the buildings and anything else that moves me.

Link Pootler : Other Stuff

Route Tips

If your app provides notes on the road surfaces etc. keep in mind that they are automatically generated and only as good as the underlying mapping. In this case the route is all on road and should present no problems. If you do the tour anti-clockwise as suggested, you will probably end up on the home straight across flat Otmoor with the wind at your back. Lovely!