Elizabeth at Rycote

Abstract

Now it is afternoon over the rolling Oxfordshire country between Shotover and Brill and Thame — much of it part of the old Royal Forest of Shotover. We have come by Waterperry and Waterstock and round by Shabbington, where in front of ‘The Old Fisherman’ a duck-board conducts the villagers along the low-lying road, so liable to be flooded by the sudden and uncertain Thame, and from there across the fields to Rycote. Having scrambled down and up the narrow moat and through the little nineteenth-century plantation gone wild, full of lilacs and rhododendrons among the bushes and small sycamores, we now sit by the lakeside, tired with our long walk. I turn back to see the chestnuts holding their candelabras low down upon the water, their heavy flowers reflected as in a mirror. It is the sleepy hour of the afternoon, but the angry rooks are restless and disturbed above the treetops, cawing for minutes together and then falling silent. Everything leans towards quiet and sleep-in-the-sun; the cry of a moorhen out on the water, a lonely ‘qurr’, only deepens the silence.