At Blenheim, the trees were planted in the formation of a winning army
When Capability Brown laid out the grounds of Blenheim Palace near Woodstock, he arranged the trees like the victorious troops at the battle the palace celebrated. It is one oddity in Oxfordshire, a county named for a ford where oxen crossed, which the Romans largely ignored and a car factory later reshaped.
Oxford's name comes from the Anglo-Saxon Oxenaford, a ford for oxen. The area mattered little until a settlement grew there in the eighth century, and the county itself appears in records in the early tenth. Alfred the Great was born at Wantage, just across the Thames. Teaching at Oxford dates from 1096, though the colleges came later, and from the 13th century the western hills grew rich on the Cotswold wool trade.
The landscape runs in bands. Ironstone-capped limestone hills around Banbury give way to the Cotswolds, then to clay vales around the Thames where most people live, and finally to chalk downs and the Chilterns in the south. The highest ground is White Horse Hill at 261 metres, beside the ancient chalk figure that gives the Vale of White Horse district its name. That district was actually part of Berkshire until boundary changes in 1974 moved Abingdon, Didcot and Wantage into Oxfordshire.
Heavy industry arrived late, when Morris Motors opened in Oxford in 1912. Farming, once the main employer, now occupies about 1.2 percent of residents thanks to mechanisation, yet the county remains mostly fields and has fewer people than smaller Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. A green belt drawn up in the 1950s surrounds the city to limit sprawl.
The great houses carry their own stories. John Vanbrugh designed Blenheim for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, after his battlefield triumph, and Winston Churchill was born there in 1874. Chastleton House stands on land bought from Robert Catesby, a Gunpowder Plot conspirator. In Oxford itself, Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre went up between 1664 and 1668, and James Gibbs's Radcliffe Camera followed in 1737 to 1749, helping make it the sixth most visited UK city for foreign tourists.
Source: Oxfordshire
