WYTCHWOOD THE OX FULL

To find out more about the routes, please visit the Oxfordshire County Council's website or purchase our guide to the Wychwood Way.

To improve their accessibility, we've installed kissing and pedestrian gates along the routes. To purchase a copy, visit our online shop.Ĭircular walks around the former Wychwood Forest range from three to seven miles in length, and pass through rolling farmland, ancient woodland and trackways, Roman villas and rural villages. We publish a very popular guide to the Wychwood Way written by Mary Webb and Alan Spicer, which also includes the circular walks mentioned below. The route takes you around the heart of the ancient Royal Forest of Wychwood, passing through gorgeous villages, river valleys, nature reserves and SSIs, and historic Bronze Age settlements. If you're keen to explore West Oxfordshire's countryside, the 37–mile circular Wychwood Way may be for you.

WYTCHWOOD THE OX FULL

We've developed short guides to ten circular routes that connect with the 37–mile Wychwood Way circuit, and a longer guide to the full 37–mile route. If you'd like to get out and explore the Wychwood on foot or by bike, there are plenty of routes to choose from. Scott, was finished in 1860 and became the focus of the Wychwood area. Leafield’s parish church, designed by Sir G. Eventually the dispute was arbitrated by John Clutton, a surveyor who carved up the disputed land equally between the Crown and the Churchills-with the surrounding villagers getting meagre allotments to compensate them for lost woodland rights. Legal wrangling between the Churchill family and the Crown over land adjoining Cornbury delayed the enclosures of the Wychwood around Leafield. Ten miles of new roads were built, along with seven new farmsteads including Kingstanding Farm. The timber felled from this acreage sold for £34,000. Within two years, 2000 acres of woodland had been cleared and converted to farmland and housing, with the help of 'tree throwing machines'. September's annual Forest Fair festivities were stopped by Lord Churchill in 1856 because of their increasing drunkenness and debauchery.

The commoners' ancient forest rights were ended and they were compensated. miles of Wychwood that remained 'Royal Forest' were taken out of Forest Law by a Parliamentary Act of Disafforestation. If nature can regain a significant foothold anywhere in the county, it's here. Traces of ancient habitats survive in the area, including limestone grasslands hosting nationally rare flowers and fragments of ancient woodland. Communities within the historic Wychwood Forest were united by shared traditions and customs, shared laws and a shared way of life.Ĭovering 120 square miles from the rolling hills of the Cotswolds to the floodplains of the Thames, the historic Wychwood area remains the least developed region in Oxfordshire. A dappled landscape of ancient forest, meadows, fields and heaths, the historic Wychwood Forest provided a variety of wild spaces for flora and fauna. In 1086, the Domesday book designated swathes of modern West Oxfordshire the 'Royal Hunting Forest of Wychwood'. Have you noticed the word 'Wychwood' in a West Oxfordshire place name? Or perhaps you've spotted a centuries-old oak in the area? Though just fragments of the historic Wychwood Forest survive today, its cultural and ecological legacy lives on.

Wytchwood the ox