Laurie R. King

From Dreaming Spies:

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,

She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, poet Matthew Arnold visited a friend who lived in a tiny village on a hill three miles from Oxford. Boar’s Hill pastoral poem Thyrsis describes the view from a small village:

This winter-eve is warm.

Humid the air; leafless, yet soft as spring

The tender purple spray on copse and briers;

And that sweet City with her dreaming spires,

She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

Boar’s Hill collected poets. John Masefield lived there. Evelyn Waugh mentions it in Brideshead Revisited. Robert Graves and his wife ran the village market for a while after the War. And one can still see this most stirring of views…if one has the permission of a resident to climb over walls or look through upper windows.