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a cool temple

The Temple of Venus stands on the southern bastion of Bridgeman’s ha-ha overlooking the south end of the Eleven-Acre Lake. Dating from 1732. The Temple of Venus is a strictly Palladian building with a central pedimented block with a coffered ceiling flanked by arcaded Ionic colonnaded quadrant wings terminating in rusticated pavilions. Built in about 1731 and probably designed by Kent the interior was originally painted. Palladian building. Circa 1732 by Kent. Central pedimented block has arched central apsidal recess with coffered ceiling and Ionic collonade. Quadrant wings of three arches with ball finials to cornice, linking to rusticated stone pavilions with open arches and broken pediments. The Temple of Venus stands on the southern bastion of Bridgeman’s ha-ha overlooking the south end of the Eleven-Acre Lake. Dating from 1731, it marks the beginning of William Kent’s employment in the gardens at Stowe, and the completion of the garden as it then existed. Even after Kent had contributed several more temples, it kept the alternative name of ‘Kent’s building’. It is built of Helmdon limestone and consists of a central pedimented block with an apsidal Ionic portico in antis linked to corner pavilions by arcaded quadrant walls. Apart from the central block, it has only one façade; the rear walls were rendered and for the most part hidden by shrubberies, which in the late eighteenth century consisted of a garden of evergreens. No direct source for the design has been suggested. The careful siting of the building and the pronounced lean of the arcade piers were noticed by Thomas Whately in 1770, who observed that the ‘elegant structure, inclined a little from a front view, becomes more beautiful by being thrown into perspective; and though at a greater distance, is more important than before, because it is alone in the view.’ Within the Temple of Venus the goddess was represented by a painting in the centre of the ceiling by the Venetian Francesco Sleter; the room was furnished with what was described as a ‘pleasuring sopha’, and inscribed around the frieze was the encouraging couplet from a Renaissance adaptation of the Pervigilium Veneris: "Nunc amet, qui nondum amavit; Quique amavit, nunc amet. (Let him love, who never lov’d before; Let him who always lov’d, now love the more.) The other parts of the decoration emphasised Venus’s role in promoting sexual jealousy and strife. In the niches surrounding the portico were busts (copies recently reinstated) of the debauched emperors Nero and Vespasian and the adultresses Cleopatra and Faustina. The internal walls were once decorated with scenes from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, also provided by Sleter. They told the story of Malbecco, the octagenarian husband of the seventeen-year-old Hellinore. She soon sought alternative pleasures, which were portrayed with frankness in the murals. The stone domes to the pavilions collapsed before the end of the eighteenth century, and in 1827–8 the 1st Duke of Buckingham replaced them with pitched lead roofs. In 1827 the doorways were altered to form round-headed arches, but the recent restoration of the temple has reinstated Kent’s design. Sleter’s murals evidently perished or were painted over during the later eighteenth century and were replaced by the 1st Duke of Buckingham with a scheme of plain, pale-coloured walls bordered with wash lines in greenish blue. The recent restoration has included the excavation of the ground to the south in order to reinstate the original line of the ha-ha. The shrubberies to either side will be replanted in the ‘ranked’ manner of the mid-eighteenth century according to available evidence, and beyond the ha-ha there now appears a scene Lord Cobham himself would have recognised: files of ‘cased’ tree seedlings on the lines of his original plantings, swinging round the bastion to link up with the earlier replantings on Warden Hill to the west. Source: nationaltrust.org.uk

A beautiful park with an obelisk as the centrefold, built in 2012 to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

If you know the English novelist Flora Thompson, you may enjoy this stop at her childhood home.

A mile north of Lower Heyford is its twin village Upper Heyford. Its location in the Cherwell Valley gives it excellent access to the verdant Oxfordshire countryside. There are plenty of local trails to explore. The Barley Mow pub is a good lunch option. The nearby RAF base was decommissioned in 1993 and many of its buildings are now listed as scheduled monuments. The site is popular with local urban explorers.

Flora Thompson (née Timms) (1876 – 1947) was a self-taught English novelist, who wrote about the decay of Victorian agrarian England. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy "Lark Rise to Candleford". "Laura's parents ... thought the house was well worth the rent, for it was two small thatched cottages made into one, with two bedrooms and a good garden. Of course, as they said, it had not the conveniences of a town house. Until they themselves had bought an oven grate and put it in the second cottage downstairs room, known as 'the wash-house', there was nowhere to bake the Sunday joint, and it was tiresome to have to draw water up from a well and irritating in wet weather to have to walk under an umbrella half way down the garden to the earth closet. But the cottage living-room was a pleasant place, with its well-polished furniture, shelves of bright crockery, and red-and-black rugs laid down to 'take the tread' on the raddled tile floor. In summer the window stood permanently open and hollyhocks and other tall flowers would push their way in and mingle with the geraniums and fuchsias on the window-sill. This room was the children's nursery ... [and ] had one advantage over most nurseries. The door opened straight out on to the garden path and in fine weather the children were allowed to run in and out as they would. Even when it rained and a board was slipped, country fashion, into grooves in the doorposts to keep them in, they could still lean out over it and feel the rain splash on their hands and see the birds flicking their wings in the puddles and smell the flowers and wet earth while they sang: 'Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day.'" From Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford"

Flora Thompson (5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford. Verse Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921) Novels Lark Rise (1939) Over to Candleford (1941) Candleford Green (1943) Lark Rise to Candleford (1945, the above three novels published as a trilogy) Still Glides the Stream (1948, published posthumously) Heatherley (1944, published posthumously first in A Country Calendar 1979 along with some Peverel Papers and some poems; then as a single volume in 1998) Gates of Eden (serialised in The Peverel Monthly edited by Thompson in the late 1920s but never published as a separate volume) Dashpers (unfinished, unpublished novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Thompson

Tusmore House in Oxfordshire, built for Wafic Said, the Syrian-born millionaire, has been declared the best new building in the classical tradition at the annual Georgian Group awards. The house is on the scale of the great houses of the 18th century. Its portico of solid stone rivals that of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. The quality of the scagliola columns in the central rotunda has been compared with the finest craftsmanship of the imperial palaces of St Petersburg. The owner and architects refused to be drawn on costs but the house has been valued at £35 million. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1475634/The-English-country-house-rises-once-more.html