The Gate.
A five-bar gate, a cattle grid and a sign that has been photographed more times than most listed buildings. This is the boundary between a road anybody can use and a working farm almost nobody can.
- At
- 0.0 miles
- Time here
- About two minutes
- Also on camera
- Live, all year
What is here.
The gate is the point of the whole exercise. On the far side of it there is a thousand acres, a shop, a yard full of machinery and about four hundred people a day who would like to walk across it. On this side there is a B-road with a verge.
Standing here in the browser costs nothing and takes nobody’s parking space. That is not a consolation prize. Given the arithmetic of the car park, it is the only version of this walk that scales past a few hundred people a day.
The gate itself is oak, hung on a stone pier, and it is the third one on this spot in six years. Gates near a well-known farm do not have a long life.
What happened here.
The queue reaches the road by half past nine on a bank holiday and stays there. That is not a boast — it is a planning problem, a highways problem and, for the people who live on this road, somebody else’s problem arriving at their driveway.
The number of people who may be on this site at once is set by a condition attached to the permission, not by us. It has been argued about at length in public, on television, and in front of West Oxfordshire District Council, which is a body that has appeared in more episodes than most of the livestock.
So the gate is where two things meet: an audience of several million and a car park that holds about seventy cars.
- At
- 0.0 miles
- Time here
- About two minutes
- Also on camera
- Live, all year
What it costs to keep.
The Gate
- A hung oak five-bar gate
- £380 to £520Plus hanging, which is the expensive half.
- Replacements since 2019
- ThreeTwo failures, one theft.
- Cattle grid, cleared out
- £200 a yearIt fills with stone and stops being a grid.
- The sign
- Replaced twiceBoth times for the same reason.
Costs are indicative ranges for work of this kind in this part of the country, not invoices. Where a figure is a published estate number rather than a general one, it says so in the row.
What to look at, while you are here.
The hinge pin
Hand-forged, and the only part of the original gate still here.
The stone pier
Cotswold limestone, dry-laid, and older than the farm’s ownership of it.
The verge
Which tells you everything about how the day is going before you turn in.
The gate camera
Live, and genuinely the most useful thing on this website.
The Gate, in the season it looks best. It does not look like this in February, and the walk changes plates when the real season at OX7 does.
Further along.
The Pub
The Farmer’s Dog, which is five miles down the road and not on this walk in any honest geographical sense.…
The Farm Shop
It started because forty tonnes of potatoes had no buyer. There is now a queue outside it most weekends, and…
The Yard
The turning circle between the grain store, the workshop and the back of the shop. It is where the farm…
The Big Field
From the top of the rise you can see the entire field at once, which means you can see the…
Watch this bit live instead.
There is a camera on or near this stop, running all year, with no audio and no zoom.
